How would you control object positions with VEX

It has to be fast the, vex SOPs work on 100's of points and I would only want to work with 20 objects

I want to take in several object transforms and use VEX to work with the information and then send it back to other objects.

this may sound like a job for chops but from what I have seen that isn’t the case mainly because VEX for chops only works on one channel and outputs only one.

This may be a feature request but what about some kind of “VEX transform operator” that can take in several matrix values and out put to several matrix values. The “Inverse Kin CHOP” pulls of most of these tricks but if we also could make something that could do these kinds of operations but let us under the hood.

I really want to wire together rigs within VEX where I can make my own constraints.

If there is an established work please tell me. I am new to Houdini so I am full of ideas that have existing solutions.

How would you control object positions with VEX

It has to be fast the, vex SOPs work on 100's of points and I would only want to work with 20 objects

I want to take in several object transforms and use VEX to work with the information and then send it back to other objects.

this may sound like a job for chops but from what I have seen that isn’t the case mainly because VEX for chops only works on one channel and outputs only one.

This may be a feature request but what about some kind of “VEX transform operator” that can take in several matrix values and out put to several matrix values. The “Inverse Kin CHOP” pulls of most of these tricks but if we also could make something that could do these kinds of operations but let us under the hood.

I really want to wire together rigs within VEX where I can make my own constraints.

If there is an established work please tell me. I am new to Houdini so I am full of ideas that have existing solutions.

Views on Polly-extrude

I am fairly new to Houdini and have come from max so I am full of my expectations from Max’s modeller. The way this issue is dealt with in max you can ad as many “edit mesh” modifiers to the model as you want steps but they are dependant on the face and vertex numbers not changing beneath them. This doesn’t make for a very procedural model but all of the edits and polly creation happen in one spot… and that is the strength of destructive modelling.

In the land of Houdini if you have a long sop chain of edits, extrudes, splits and bevels, that are more than say 12 sop's long, based on numbered vertex or face selections. You can edit operations and move points up the chain but any change to the faces or vertex count beneath is going to turn the end resalt into ciaos.

This is not to say an extrude, split or bevel, sop with multiple operations stored inside one sop is an idea that would fail it would just be subject to the same issues of selections by name or number needing to remain true before and after the face numbers change.

One future that could be a benefit would be a default selection of “previous_extrude_primitives” being made, this would be the selection that you would get if you just right clicked and continued extruding except that it would be a named selection and not dependant on the vertex numbers changing. Now there is an option to group the end and side faces but these need to be unequally named. If the “previous_extrude_primitives” was redefined by the previous extrude each time it would be able to be more flexible and tolerant of face number changes.

Just my 2c hmmm no make it 20c.