Hello everyone, im forcing myself to learn houdini, i started watching some Entagma tutorial and basic stuff.
I want to take it slowly due to the amount of information and steep learning curve.
I am a Softimage user with experience with maya, 3ds max and other 3d platform, so im trying to grasp as much as i can from Houdini and make it my new toolkit.


I just managed to recreate the energy spiral by Simon Fiedler on entagma youtube channel ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clGL-do0YNg&ab_channel=Entagma [www.youtube.com] ) for anyone who did not watch it.

My simple question is this, in the tutorial they use a line so from point A (start) to point B (end of the line) to create some spiral curve effect.
How would i approach to have a custom A starting point and a custom B starting point? Basically i would like to attach the curve lets say to a cube vertex and end up into a torus point and stay attached to those two, like for example a cobweb.

From my understanding i would have to calculate and tell houdini that the first point of the curve should be in the same place of the point i choose on that cube, and that the end point of the curve should be on the point i choose on the next geometry i want attached it to, ie a torus o something else.

How would i do this?

Thank you for all your help!

Max

Hello - I'm from a similar back ground although I was 80% 3DS Max. Sounds like you are taking the right approach, I did the same sort of thing.

Focus on how you manipulate points, pretty much everything in houdini is based around points. Sooner of later it will start to click, but you will more than likly hit a few brick walls along the journey... it's really quite a different approach to the autodesk products, but once you get it, you'll never ever want to go back

Not exactly sure what you meant but had a play and see attached.
My journey focused quite a bit on vex, so i tend to fall back to that when im not sure how to do somthing with nodes.
I'm sure someone might know a much simpler way to do this with just standard nodes.

not 100% sure what you mean but to crete a line between 2 already existing points you can use the add node.

then you can remap x to the line and y to an arbitrary line that is 90 degrees from it.

From what i understood you want to have a line going between 2 geometries to then have your spiral animate between.

a simple one is to create a line, use an attribute copy and copy the "P" attribute from the point you want to attach the line to. That way you can specify the specific points by their point number, you can even do away with the blast nodes and explicitly define the point number you want to connect to.