I have seen similar artefacts before - and recall eliminating them by fiddling with parameters in the subdivide node, and maybe the bevel node. I can't reproduce on your simple example. My hunch is your geometry is messed up with some duplicate geometry that sits on top of your intended geometry. You can't debug by eyeballing the geometry you need to upload your hip file.
I am not sure how you did things so I have done a couple of different approaches. It might help you track down your problem.
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Houdini Indie and Apprentice » Edges breaks after subdividing
- mmc
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Houdini Learning Materials » Following first tutorial, got to the end, play does nothing
- mmc
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You need to change the attractor and node group nodes from “Primitive” to “Point” then the solver will work. Your difficulty here is the reason why I now will no longer buy Houdini training that does not include the .hip file, nor will attempt to rebuild .hip files for free tutorials (rather I will just sit back and watch!).
Houdini is a programming language it is very tedious and error prone to re write the program yourself as you listen and watch a video. If things go wrong you have to keep re-watching till you find what you missed. I checked the tutorial, and he does very clearly say change group type from prim to point in both cases - but it is so each to miss these key steps when you are listening / watching / build an node tree in another window!
Of course the fact that Houdini is a programming language means when tutorial authors give you the .hip file you can read the code and concentrate on understanding the algorithm rather than rebuilding. For me that is now the benchmark for handing over money - give me the .hip file!
Houdini is a programming language it is very tedious and error prone to re write the program yourself as you listen and watch a video. If things go wrong you have to keep re-watching till you find what you missed. I checked the tutorial, and he does very clearly say change group type from prim to point in both cases - but it is so each to miss these key steps when you are listening / watching / build an node tree in another window!
Of course the fact that Houdini is a programming language means when tutorial authors give you the .hip file you can read the code and concentrate on understanding the algorithm rather than rebuilding. For me that is now the benchmark for handing over money - give me the .hip file!
Edited by mmc - 2020年10月21日 10:30:11
Technical Discussion » Building shaders in mat context for 3Delight
- mmc
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I have been migrating a tutorial from Mantra to 3Delight. There is a limited number of 3Delight nodes you can use in a mat context. I was hoping you could mix houdini nodes with the 3Delight nodes: e.g. do some calculation to build say a value for the vector colour attribute, then convert the vector to 3 floats, the use the 3Delight FloatToColour node to build a 3Delight Colour object. The nodes join, types match i.e. the output of the Manta node is floats the input to the 3Delight node is floats, but the values get ignored.
It is not clear to me if this is because 3Delight is still Beta so not everything works as expected - or if by design this plugging of nodes is just never going to work? I would imagine the Houdini node interpreter would have no problem passing the float along so it must be 3Delight that is failing to get the plumbing to work.
The is a question in principle since I have worked around in 2 ways: 3Delight has a (horrible) condition node that can be used for the logic I needed (but doing so involves you implementing the logic 2x - once for Mantra once for 3Delight). My second solution was to take the nodes out of the mat context and put them in a VOP in the obj context and set an attribute. In the mat context you just then read the attribute using the supplied 3Delight node. This either means you end up with duplicate code in the obj context for 3Delight, and the mat context for Mantra, or you move shader logic out of mat context - which seems to be taking it away from where it should be.
I wanted to have a set up that had a switch to flick to move from Mantra to 3Delight and to share the Mantra logic as much as possible in the mat context.
It is not clear to me if this is because 3Delight is still Beta so not everything works as expected - or if by design this plugging of nodes is just never going to work? I would imagine the Houdini node interpreter would have no problem passing the float along so it must be 3Delight that is failing to get the plumbing to work.
The is a question in principle since I have worked around in 2 ways: 3Delight has a (horrible) condition node that can be used for the logic I needed (but doing so involves you implementing the logic 2x - once for Mantra once for 3Delight). My second solution was to take the nodes out of the mat context and put them in a VOP in the obj context and set an attribute. In the mat context you just then read the attribute using the supplied 3Delight node. This either means you end up with duplicate code in the obj context for 3Delight, and the mat context for Mantra, or you move shader logic out of mat context - which seems to be taking it away from where it should be.
I wanted to have a set up that had a switch to flick to move from Mantra to 3Delight and to share the Mantra logic as much as possible in the mat context.
Houdini Indie and Apprentice » Indie through Sidefx vs Steam
- mmc
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I believe you can run daily builds.
The big advantage of Steam is that if you have many computers you regularly use you can install on them all and the Steam DRM will only allow you to use one at a time. I beleive you can do this with 2 for the regular.
The big advantage of Steam is that if you have many computers you regularly use you can install on them all and the Steam DRM will only allow you to use one at a time. I beleive you can do this with 2 for the regular.
Edited by mmc - 2020年6月29日 16:53:06
Houdini Indie and Apprentice » Houdini Indie via Steam... for Linux?
- mmc
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If you look on the discussion pages on the Steam store the answer is “no plan but maybe”
Houdini Lounge » Mac Pro with limited resources
- mmc
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The reality for me is to run both Windows and MacOS. You don't have to switch. I have been a Mac user since the II (my first work desktop computer post a terminal and a share of a PDP-11) and a Macintosh Classic first home computer. I have an old iMac, MacBook Pro, and Air that I use when I can - and when they run out of steam I have a Windows box I built from a barebones kit. I admit I am not in your league of $9k to spend (this is a hobby not a profession) but the principle is the same. For your investment maybe you could get a new iMac, and a Windows box - and maybe some change for a beer or 3.
Technical Discussion » How to destruct FBX model?
- mmc
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https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/applied-houdini-rigids-i-fundamentals/ [www.sidefx.com]
Suggest you work through this one as a first step.
Suggest you work through this one as a first step.
Houdini Indie and Apprentice » Houdini Indie licensing for two separate computers...
- mmc
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If you can live with Steam this one is now fixed. Steam allows you to install on as many machines as you want, allowing you to run it on only one. You can get the daily builds too. SideFX seems to be serious with the Steam platform. I bagged a free license when they were beta testing the mac version. Worked like a charm.
Houdini Lounge » Does SideFX take part in Black Friday sales on Houdini?
- mmc
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Apprentice won't. Left of field option FXPhd are doing a Black Friday sale $66 a month for their premium tier You can use their licence servers for Houdini FX (and a bunch of other software) as well as download your fill of their courses. Not a realistic forever option - but last year I did it for 4m. Since then a few new good Houdini tutorials have dropped so I signed up again.
Edited by mmc - 2019年12月1日 10:03:27
Houdini Indie and Apprentice » Cannot sign into License Administrator Houdini 2018
- mmc
- 30 posts
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Agree something is up with auto license generation. Doing it manually is very easy - just follow the instructions.
Houdini Indie and Apprentice » Stick with $JOB or use $HIP
- mmc
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I vote stick with $HIP. As soon as you save a new file $HIP is created for you. All I am interested in is the ability to make file references relative to $HIP. I regularly use different computers, with my files in different absolute locations since everything is in Dropbox.
I think the only thing a project gives you is the default bunch of directories, and the ability to create your own directories. If you always create the same folder structure every time you create a scene then that would be useful. I don't, so $HIP gives me all I need.
I think the only thing a project gives you is the default bunch of directories, and the ability to create your own directories. If you always create the same folder structure every time you create a scene then that would be useful. I don't, so $HIP gives me all I need.
Houdini Learning Materials » Ground Plane missing?
- mmc
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Look under the “Collisions” tab it has moved. However if you are completely new I would advise junking that tutorial as is is too old. You need to ensure your first tutorials are for the version you are using. Converting old tutorials is doable but can be very hard.
Houdini Indie and Apprentice » Beginner in need of help!
- mmc
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This problem is a good illustration of the power of the Houdini approach. Find the root(s) of the network. Set the display flag on that node and work your way down the network until you find a node that won't cook - i.e. gives an error. Likely you will find path to a directory that does not exist on your machine. An easy fix just change it or create it. You might find an input is missing - if that is something cached by a different file you are likely screwed. You might discover a execution dependency order in the file, and have to recook in the right order.
It's a program - debug it by single stepping through it!
It's a program - debug it by single stepping through it!
Edited by mmc - 2019年8月27日 22:43:30
Houdini Learning Materials » attr wrangle vex
- mmc
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The why I could not say - no idea of the context. The what is easier I think. This is a code snippet that is run over vertices. @vtnum is the number of the vertex each time the code is called. The way to visualise I think is to use the geometry spreadsheets - anything you want to see define an attribute with that value and you see it is the geometry spreadsheet.
Houdini Learning Materials » Yesterday I made a major step forward in my understanding of Houdini
- mmc
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Glad to see my old thread bubbling up! My learning journey continues. It is an “interest” not my day job so progress is steady but not that fast. Currently doing a course on “Procedural Spline Modelling” on FXPhd. This course has literaly blown my socks off. Worth a months subscription for anyone who is intermediate level.
I am an old programmer, and starting to feel really at home with an application that is essentially a domain specific programming language.
I am hoping 2019 is the year I finally move from apprentice to Indie. What SideFX is offering for free, and for modest subscription with some limitations is market leading in my view. Onwards and upwards.
I am an old programmer, and starting to feel really at home with an application that is essentially a domain specific programming language.
I am hoping 2019 is the year I finally move from apprentice to Indie. What SideFX is offering for free, and for modest subscription with some limitations is market leading in my view. Onwards and upwards.
Houdini Indie and Apprentice » One minute silence for our Substance user friends
- mmc
- 30 posts
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Reading between the lines of things I have read over the past day I see some logic here. Adobe are looking to launch a 3d-Adobe Cloud subs. The existing bunch of stuff is very “flat” well 2d. They still need to buy a modeller btw (Modo or C4D seem likely - Houdini not ). The Allegoritmic guys are first in and will build this empire. They hope it will make them rich and famous. Good luck to them I say. It may or may not work.
I have a Adobe Cloud Sub. I have a perpetual license for SP and SD - so I am somewhat ambivalent about the move. I do frequently wish I could pick and mix a subset of Adobe Cloud apps for a lower price point, and would pick and mix with a 3d bias. So I have some interest in this working out.
I have a Adobe Cloud Sub. I have a perpetual license for SP and SD - so I am somewhat ambivalent about the move. I do frequently wish I could pick and mix a subset of Adobe Cloud apps for a lower price point, and would pick and mix with a 3d bias. So I have some interest in this working out.
Edited by mmc - 2019年1月25日 08:39:04
Houdini Lounge » H17 on Mac?
- mmc
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For 3D I would not invest in Mac at this point. I now have an 5 year old iMac and 2 Mac laptops which I want to keep going for as long as possible - but my last new build was a PC. I was able to build something as good as a MacPro for a fraction of the cost. As things stand today I will never get another Mac desktop. Laptop just maybe.
Houdini Lounge » Houdini Indie on Steam
- mmc
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Houdini Lounge » Houdini Indie on Steam
- mmc
- 30 posts
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Will this be available for Mac as well? The page only mentions Windows. If it will be, and it follows the usual Steam “install on many only run on one at a time” licensing Model this will be great news, and might compensate for them not offering the 2 year discount rate. I really want Indie - but since I travel all week I really need to be able to run it on either desktop or laptop. So far I am coping well with Apprentice - but the time to move on is getting closer.
Very impressed with SideFX and their support of the Apprentice/Indie end of the market.
[store.steampowered.com]
Very impressed with SideFX and their support of the Apprentice/Indie end of the market.
[store.steampowered.com]
Edited by mmc - 2018年10月11日 02:17:23
Houdini Learning Materials » Yesterday I made a major step forward in my understanding of Houdini
- mmc
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I accept this is an indulgence on my part, but I wanted to record this. Plus I feel they're important points to be made here about learning Houdini. Yesterday I decided to start RohanD's hard surface modelling tutorial. The very first thing he does is create a nurbs circle and add some normals (I think in H15):
I match exactly the nodes in H16, and it all goes horribly wrong:
At this point in my newbie state, I am stumped. I have replicated exactly 2 nodes, and I get a different result. This illustrates two problems for the learner - one is the danger of not using the same version (something has changed in Houdini) and secondly and this is the really important thing: you can't learn Houdini by paint by numbers. I played paint by numbers with a handful of really enjoyable tutorials: e.g. Rohan's rocker, a rocket launcher on the old Digital Tutors, and architectural destruction recent one on Pluralsight. The harsh reality of those was that whilst I finished I did not understand the detail of what was happening. In a very troubling way, I had not learnt anything.
The next thing Rohan did was use the point node (now deprecated) to add an up vector. I knew in H16 there was a new node called attribute expression that you were supposed to use instead of the point node so I - first leap in understanding - worked out how to use that for both the normal and the up vector. It finally dawned on me that a “normal” was just an attribute that was labelled with the string “N” that could point where ever you wanted. And an attribute is just a property of, in this case, a point on a circle. The polyframe node is just one way of computing an attribute called N that points where you want, but in a really weird way: you select an attribute called tangetu and relabel it to N. The formula to compute N is buried inside the node, and will depend on the paramters.
The insight was to realise that we want a normal pointing to the center of the circle - well this the is just the position vector pointing in reverse: -@P. Usually, you would make this of unit length so: normalize(-@P). The attribute expression applies this formula to each point on the circle. Each point has a position vector, reverse and normalize each to get the desired normal:
Now I am on a roll. The attribute expression I think is a gentle introduction to writing some VEX code. Second leap - use a point wrangle node to write 2 lines of VEX:
The node applies these 2 lines to each point (in an efficient parallel way if you have multicore on your machine):
By the way, I worked out how to fix the polyframe: the style parameter of the node should be set to Primitive Centroid. This will trigger a computation of the tangentu to point to the center, and since we have renamed that attribute to N we have the desired normal.
Old tutorials can't be blamed for changes to Houdini. Rohan could not have explained all the above nitty gritty detail about what polyframe was doing behind the scenes without the tutorial becoming unmanageably long. But here is the rub: the learner will never understand what is happening until they have grasped this detail. I wish there was more beginner training that focused on this low level technical detail. Maybe I have reached the point where this is no longer required - but it took far too long for my liking for this to happen!
PS note the up vector should be spelt @up not @upVec. Copy to points uses the up vector to orientate the geometry being copied to the points. The z axis points along the normal, the y asiz along the up vector.
I match exactly the nodes in H16, and it all goes horribly wrong:
At this point in my newbie state, I am stumped. I have replicated exactly 2 nodes, and I get a different result. This illustrates two problems for the learner - one is the danger of not using the same version (something has changed in Houdini) and secondly and this is the really important thing: you can't learn Houdini by paint by numbers. I played paint by numbers with a handful of really enjoyable tutorials: e.g. Rohan's rocker, a rocket launcher on the old Digital Tutors, and architectural destruction recent one on Pluralsight. The harsh reality of those was that whilst I finished I did not understand the detail of what was happening. In a very troubling way, I had not learnt anything.
The next thing Rohan did was use the point node (now deprecated) to add an up vector. I knew in H16 there was a new node called attribute expression that you were supposed to use instead of the point node so I - first leap in understanding - worked out how to use that for both the normal and the up vector. It finally dawned on me that a “normal” was just an attribute that was labelled with the string “N” that could point where ever you wanted. And an attribute is just a property of, in this case, a point on a circle. The polyframe node is just one way of computing an attribute called N that points where you want, but in a really weird way: you select an attribute called tangetu and relabel it to N. The formula to compute N is buried inside the node, and will depend on the paramters.
The insight was to realise that we want a normal pointing to the center of the circle - well this the is just the position vector pointing in reverse: -@P. Usually, you would make this of unit length so: normalize(-@P). The attribute expression applies this formula to each point on the circle. Each point has a position vector, reverse and normalize each to get the desired normal:
Now I am on a roll. The attribute expression I think is a gentle introduction to writing some VEX code. Second leap - use a point wrangle node to write 2 lines of VEX:
@N = normalize(-@P);
v@upVec = {0,0,1};
The node applies these 2 lines to each point (in an efficient parallel way if you have multicore on your machine):
By the way, I worked out how to fix the polyframe: the style parameter of the node should be set to Primitive Centroid. This will trigger a computation of the tangentu to point to the center, and since we have renamed that attribute to N we have the desired normal.
Old tutorials can't be blamed for changes to Houdini. Rohan could not have explained all the above nitty gritty detail about what polyframe was doing behind the scenes without the tutorial becoming unmanageably long. But here is the rub: the learner will never understand what is happening until they have grasped this detail. I wish there was more beginner training that focused on this low level technical detail. Maybe I have reached the point where this is no longer required - but it took far too long for my liking for this to happen!
PS note the up vector should be spelt @up not @upVec. Copy to points uses the up vector to orientate the geometry being copied to the points. The z axis points along the normal, the y asiz along the up vector.
Edited by mmc - 2018年4月1日 04:55:09
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