You may be interested to know that I passed this code by chatGPT to see if it could detect a problem with it. It pretty accurately summed up the code's purpose this way:

"In summary, the code iterates over a list of barb IDs, finds the points associated with each barb, identifies the smallest point number for each barb, and adds that point to a specific point group."

However, the "stemPoints" group that is generated has zero members and I can't see why, nor does chatGPT (btw, I'm finding that chatGPT seems to reliably produce code that doesn't quite work ). I'm hoping someone here can help me spot the problem.

BTW - the following code is running in a wrangle node set to detail mode. Also, my checks seem to verify that the barbIDsList attribute contains correct values, as does the numberOfPoints variable. And, the "id" attribute" on each point identifies the "barb" - a curve - that it is a member of and yes - that attribute exists and contains correct values.

Oh - and I've attached a houdini scene that demo's the problem.

int numberOfPoints = npoints(0);

//run through one barb at a time
foreach (int barb; barbIdsList){
int barbPointIds = {};
int j = 0;

//get pointNum of all points belonging to current barb
for (int pnt = 0; pnt < numberOfPoints; pnt++) {
if (point(0, "id", pnt) == barb) {
barbPointIds = pnt;
j++;

}
}

//identify smallest point number among the point numbers for the current barb
int smallestPointId = 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000;
foreach (int pnt; barbPointIds) {
if (pnt < smallestPointId) {
smallestPointId = pnt;

}

}

setpointgroup(0,"stemPoints", smallestPointId, 1, "set");

}

I found the problem. The very large number I initialized the "smallestPointId" variable with was larger than houdini allows. I had to put it down to 99999999999999999 for it to work.

fbb
I had to put it down to 99999999999999999

that's still pretty arbitrary and you will find out that the value stored is avtually 1569325055, which is better than your previous number which resulted in -1, but still not the largest possible

so either replace it with maximum 32bit signed integer value (unless you work in 64bit, which would be higher)

or change that part of your code to this so that you dont have to care about initializing it to high number:

that being said, since you are dealing with curves and they most likely have first vertex near the stem you can possibly replace both of your wrangles with a single Point Wrangle

@tamte - thank you so much for those insights. I can see how the first one would work. I'll try out the second option when I'm back at work.

Also instead of looping, for less code writting, one could do the following to either get the smallest or largest value of an array:


or even simpler: