dan.baciu

Hello everybody.

I was trying to instance (point instancing) a subnet which contains a light and some geometry.
Together they form a lamp rig of sorts (a neon lamp)
Now, I want a part of the lamp geometry inside the subnet to not cast shadows from the light,
and I can set this using the “Shadow Mask” option of the light.
The problem is that this do not work with instancing (or point instancing).
I don't know how to make every instanced light to not cast shadows from it's corespondent instanced geometry.
This doesn't work even if I make a HDA out of this subnet (which is the goal anyway).
Also, It seems that I can't see the contains of the subnet (light OR geo)
in the viewport in case of instancing, why is that?

In the end, the goal is to make a lamp asset (together with light and geometry)
that I can also instance on many points in a scene.
How should I approach this?

You are aware that to have a complete description of orientation you need at least a normal and an up vector. The normal should point along the curve and the up vector defines the direction perpendicular to the curve in this case.
Looky here: http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini14.0/copy/instanceattrs [sidefx.com]

In a for each loop you can use an expression like rand(stamp(“../”, “FORVALUE”, 0)*733.73).
This way the rand function will generate a random offset using the iteration number times some other number (for variation) as a seed.
So you can have for U rand(stamp(“../”, “FORVALUE”, 0)*733.73)
and for V rand(stamp(“../”, “FORVALUE”, 0)*328.42)