Please, what is the current state of building a scene in a non-procedural way in the viewport? It is still a bit cumbersome to select & transform multiple objects in the viewport.

I suppose we are waiting for a new release of the Stage Manager?
Or is there a new tool?

(I have attached a gif of my attempt to select two spheres with a Stage manager and scale and rotate them)

I have found that the stage manager for doing things like this in bigger scenes is tough to work with. The layout node is great for things like trees and rocks, but for assets that need a lot of accurate refinement in terms of placement like buildings or lamp posts (man-made), I find that it's too clunky and difficult to use.

What I have found in the current project we are working on is that actually doing the bulk of your placement in the OBJ context with nulls is easier. Giving those nulls Normal attributes in SOPs and then using the names of the nulls to drive a string attribute that, when pulled into an instance in LOPs, can drive an index attribute. Then I bring in the proxy geo from LOPs to SOPs and set up a copy to points as reference for what I am doing with the nulls that matches the instancer in LOPs.

Unfortunately, LOPs doesn't have a light, elegant solution for a lot of these sorts of layout problems that I have found. The Stage Manager and Layout Node are awesome for some things, but for big heavy assets that need tedious refinement, where selecting multiple objects like this, they're not there yet. I'm hoping that there is a nice upgrade coming soon that solves this!

Hello Daniel, thank you very much for your answer. The approach you described is really inspirational, thanks for describing it. So far I am also doing most of the layout in sops or obj contexts. I have read a post (before the 20.5) that SideFX is reworking some of the concepts. SO I believe that in the near future we will have better LOP tools.

I found the post:
https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/95283/#post-418987 [www.sidefx.com]

"The layout LOP has seen some bug fixes since the H20 release, but major improvements to that node will have to wait until the Houdini release after the next one."


Thanks a lot again and best regards!