Adrian Cruceru

yes it does make sense. i would love to see a window with all the nodes but like a huge dependecy graph, kind'of like shake where you can visualy see if there are parameters connected.

with all the panes i need i feel like having 2 monitors it's a must in houdini.

mtucker: what i meant about the clone thing is that if you are defining a new type but the source of these node remains the same, just an analogy between a clone in xsi or an instance in maya where changes do propagate from the source to the destination. it's an analogy. i know it's more than a simple clone or instance

J.C. i was asking if there's a way to see all nodes in a scene (like treeview) and use a tool similar to drvien keys in maya, drag a node on top of another node opens a window and ask you to link avaiable parameters, in shake you just ctrl+drag from one node to another node parameters to link them. since the scene is an unix file system you have to go up and down the path to get the nodes so you never have all the nodes in the same time displayed in the UI (except treeview i guess). it's pretty hard to make an artist understand the relative path of a file system especially when they have shells. but if you can drag and drop fields it's more than enough (appart copy/paste parameters)

one thing that blew me away was the fact that i can control rendering with rgb channels, one of the biggest limitation of maya is the hardware rendering system, you cannot control the line with of a particle render in time, you can control the length of a line rendered particle through speed (up to a point) but you cannot control on per particle basis the width of a line. i find that amazing in houdini

and i'm just opening the box. i can't think of what i'm gonna find inside.

cheers

mtucker
…Each SHOP type is associated with a particular renderer.

can i blend them together, meaning, can i use rman for some objects and mantra for others? but in the end i have to pas through a ROP …

mtucker
So what about VOPs? VOPs are just a different way to define a SHOP type. Or, more precisely, they are a way to generate VEX code using a GUI (VEX code is used by Houdini for shaders, but can also be used to write SOP types, POP types, CHOP types, and COP types).

should i guess that VEX is like a c code ready to be compiled for whatever i need then?

mtucker
So a VOP Network defines a SHOP type. If you create a VOP Network of type VEX Surface Shader (even VOP Networks, which define new node types, have a node type of their own) called newglass, with the SHOP Type Name New Glass, then you have defined a new SHOP type called New Glass. You can now create 10 SHOPs of type New Glass. As you modfy the contents of the VOP Network, all the SHOP instances will change their behavior to match the new VEX code that the VOP Network is generating.

that's very interesting, looks like file referencing but in the same file, kind of clone of a node

mtucker
This will save the VEX code from the VOP Network into an OTL (operator type library, which is a collection of node types). The SHOP type in this OTL can be installed into any hip file, and used without requiring the New Glass VOP Network in the hip file. The advantage to this is that your hip files will be smaller and more efficient, and you can easily change the definition of the New Glass SHOP in all your hip files just by updating the one OTL file.

That's interesting, looks like a shake macro that uses another macro as a function but faster

does it run slower than using API to write plugins?

mtucker
Anyway, I hope this makes things clearer as opposed to cloudier. Mark

yes it does

thank you very much

now that's the way to go, using VEX you can boldbly go where no one has gone before …

JC, i started animation on SGIs so i love UNIX, by any chance is there a way to reference parameters graphically? for example in shake i can use nodename.parameter in another node to reference a parameter, in combustion it's the same tree, unix like structure (just it can't get that complex as in houdini)

once again, thank you for your help everyone

damn, i wish i had prisms in back in 93, jeff wagner showed me houdini 1.0 at IBC in 95 or 96 and i was blown away at that time but my road was already paved with alias products and i had to push maya to the limits so i'm sure it's not me the moron that can't get it done, but i'm rather bound by the limits of the tools. i'm sure there are bugs in houdini as well but i'm also sure there are more workarouds since it's more open.

i'm still trying to understand how was the whisky splash done for Johnny Walker years ago on Houdini 1.0 from someone at SPI i guess. I would love to understand how can it be done. If anyone was an example of that feel free to share it cause trying to replicate that in maya, xsi or max it's just a waste of time.