Hi everyone.
I'm learning and modeling a car with Houdini. I met some issues.
I need your experience for suggestions.
(CPU:i7 970 GPU:GTX960 OS: WIN10 H:15.0.347)
(1) Viewport Subdivision is very very slow and useless. Therefore, I use subdivision operator, but I must switch subdivision manually between operators. It's not efficient. What is your solution?

(2) Doing Symmetry Modeling, I always leave “Mirror” operator at the end of the stream. What is your solution about it?

(3) I knew someone has developed a modeling plugin for H15. How do you select operators quickly? I always type keywords.

(4) After a long process, there are operators in network(see Image 001). How do you handle these nodes? Or I should export models of each critical step and load them back in Houdini. Then, continue the new process?

(5) When modeling, the normal often looks like Image 002. I have to use lots of “Normal” operator to fix. How do you handle it? Especially, Polycap always makes a weird mesh.

Thanks for your sharing and help.

Happy New Year

Tony

Seeing this post just shows how noone really uses houdini for serious modelling tasks… Kind of sad. I have to agree with all your points. here my notes:

1)
Same Situation here. + and - Shortcuts for displaying Subdivision lags and most the time its just too slow, making it unusable. Its really crap and im glad someone finally mention this.

2)
pretty much the same but i dont do a lot of mirrored modeling atm. if i had to i put the mirror at the very end.

3)
not sure what is meant. i think selection works good.

4)
Subnets or just bake out the geo. (write to disk and read back, dont use the lock node mode at all.)

5) yea typical houdini. And now the extrude sop just adds useless vertex normals. cause sesi thought it is what users wanted. I think they didnt understand what people meant when asking for clean normals in the viewport.
I just put a delete attribtue with delete N in vertex to get rid of all the normals houdini is unable to generate correct. you can imagine how often you would have to do this after doing changes to your model.. (its funny they added vertex normals to the extrude sop but not to the polycap, bevel or any other poly tools)

And now look at the journal:
“Changed the default for the ”add vertex normals“ toggle to off to prevent addition of cusped normals which clearly affect downstream subdivisions unfavourably.”

Now the add vertex normal on the extrude sop will just rot in hell until they finally decide to remove it from the node.

Finally, I must say thank you for your opinions.
I posted 3 questions. Two solved by myself.
One is solved with you.

(1)About viewport subdivision
I share my solution about the subdivision.
I wrote a simple script to switch subdivision. Subdivision Node offers better result and speed. Therefore, I've done this. You can watch it through the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qshkgwz8YKs&feature=youtu.be [youtube.com]

(2)Question about deleting N in vertex
If I delete N in vertex, does it take any bad influence to the model? If yes, how do you handle it?

It's really funny, when you talked about some nodes without vertex normals.

Thank you

Tony

1) looks good, but to me the tessellation subdivision in viewport must get faster, We want quick subdivision display in the viewport that actually works and doesnt take 10 seconds to load.

2) It will remove all the Vertex normals from your model. so if you need certain normals thats not gonna do it. What is actually necessary if you already have normals and want to keep them, only select the primitives without normals. (like the ones prooduces by polycap, polybevel etc. which show up black) And add a vertex sop or normal sop to those. and tada. it will look clean.

All we need is vertex normal generation in all the polytools and that would probably solve lots of issues people have with the normals. Also we need a polybevel 2.0 with the next release asap.

Doudini
1) looks good, but to me the tessellation subdivision in viewport must get faster, We want quick subdivision display in the viewport that actually works and doesnt take 10 seconds to load.

It would be best to post a scene and comparison of this slow subdivision speed - I'm not aware of a 10 second load, unless you do adaptive subdivision, set in the preferences.

Doudini
1) looks good, but to me the tessellation subdivision in viewport must get faster, We want quick subdivision display in the viewport that actually works and doesnt take 10 seconds to load.

We use OpenSubDiv for subdivision in the viewport (both adaptive and non), and speed is among the things that are on their ToDo for upcoming versions. It's also not very forgiving of some topologies currently and I think Pixar is aware of this as well.

i am speaking about what twod mentions.

seems like it really isnt that fast: (takes few seconds for him too)
https://youtu.be/xFZazwvYc5o?t=2035 [youtu.be]