Tyler Britton

I am running into this problem as well. I have Arnold, and when I installed GameDev tools all my shaders went away. It happens with new scenes as well as existing scenes. I checked my $PATH and $HOUDINI_PATH vars and they seem to be loading all the proper stuff from a glance.

I am importing layout geometry and I am converting it to a HeightField with a HeightField and HeightField Project sop. This is working great, however I was wondering if there was a way I could find the correct Grid Spacing values to roughly match the poly amount of the layout geometry with my new heightfield after I convert it to geo with a convertheightfield sop. I can do this manually but adjusting the grid spacing, but I want something a bit more procedural.

Right now I am find how many polygons are in the layout geometry, as well as the max x and z size, and forming an equation to try to detect this automatically, and checking my math by converting the new heightfield to polygons.

My equation I have so far is something like this
(ch(“sizex”)*(GRID SPACING VALUE)^2 * ch(“sizey”)*(GRID SPACING VALUE)^2) = (TOTAL POLYGONS)
This is of course incorrect, but I was wondering if there is a way at all to calculate this out. I can't attach a hip right now, but I can later if this doesn't make sense at all.

This can easily be done. If you have all your points black, then color your points when you want them to start their animation, you can then throw down a sop solver, inside the solver, add a wrangle node and this expression below.

//Inside sop solver with Previous Frame being Input
vector Cd1 = point(1, “Cd”, @ptnum);
vector Cd2 = point(0, “Cd”, @ptnum);
@Cd = max(Cd1, Cd2);
if (Cd1 == 0 && Cd2 == 1)
i@hitframe = int(@Frame);
if (point(1, “hitframe”, @ptnum) != 0)
@hitframe = point(1, “hitframe”, @ptnum);


Just be sure to put the Previous Frame into input (second input on the wrangle). This script will record the frame that the point turns from black, to white. If you time shift to the end of the sop solver sim, and then transfer the hitframe attribute back into your original points, then that should get you started.