Liam G

Well I seem to have figured it out, but it doesn't feel elegant. I made an edge group, then used a triangulate2d, the another edge group, then used a group combine to subtract them, then a dissolve sop to delete the difference group edges. Using a delete sop seemed to delete everything but the dissolve worked.

This feels like it's a probably embarrassingly simple answer, but I'm still new to Houdini and it's not obvious to me.

I've got a spiral grid of points connected by lines (polygons? primitives?) that I want to have as a normal mesh, so I can extrude faces etc. The closest I've gotten to what I want is with a Triangulate2D, but that adds all of the additional triangles I'm trying to avoid instead of maintaining the nice quads I have now.

Polyfill/polycap/polybridge/skin don't seem to do what I'm looking for either.

What's the usual approach here?

I rendered out an image with a few extra image planes as a pic, then composited those planes together into RGBA channels in a COP network with channelcopy. I'm now stuck on what should be the easy part: just writing out the result to a file. I see the correct result in the composite view, which is my nice RGB image with a separate alpha in A, but when I write out a tga or png I get the alpha premultiplied and it blacks out most of my RGB.

I can get around it by outputting multiple images and comping in Photoshop, but that effectively means I can't use COPs at all for most of my purposes if I can't pack data into different channels without channel crosstalk.

I'm sure I must be doing something wrong, but what is it?