chrisw

Thanks for all replies. I had a few days to dig into docs and the replies really helped. Really, thanks. I guess maya and houdini is like translating spanish and english, some things are almost the same, other things don't work the same way at all, but all mean the same thing.

Last thing. Is this a vex thing I describe? Just so I know so I can leave it for a later stage of my on-the-job-learnings ;

I have an object. I can use add sops and point sops to keep just the points that inherit shading normals from the original object, in preparation for adding sprites to the points as particles that use those normals for lighting. All ok until I add sprites and then I lose normals and just get a default normal facing the camera. And I cannot see how I can stop this behaviour. I am not a really, really technical user so going into vex at this stage is too early for me, I know how to do a similar thing in maya because I used the software a long time - that method I would make softbody object, add a mel expression in particle node to inherit normal orientation, then throw away underlying object to just leave particle cloud with original normals ready for lighting. Is there a way I can inherit normal directions directly in my houdini scenes?

Thnk u,

Hi,

Please help me … :cry:

I am having to switch over from maya to houdini. I am very experienced with maya and I have done just fine with the basic tutorials with houdini but I am getting a bit overwhelmed or frustrated, I must admit, in just trying to translate 3d sthings I would do in maya for their equivalents in houdini ;

Is there anyone else there that knows both softwares and can point me to the correct terms or methods in Houdini for doing ;

clusters
freeze transformations
goalPP
particle i.d. and expressions
poly average
snap to vertice
blendshape snapshot
point, orient and parent constraints

So many others …. but these are the ones that are really stopping me in my tracks at the moment in translating things from maya.

thank u