Learning so much from you guys, thank you. A question – if I wanted to build in each sepearte part of this construct i.e each object appeared so as if driven by a fall off, would this also need to be done in a for loop? I have built something similar but more as a tower structure and i’d like the pieces to animate/pop in from the bottom to the top, as if the construct was growing/getting taller etc. Hope you can help and thanks again for all these incredible resources!
Hey Richard, sorry for the late reply, I had to focus on the Houdini 20 Launch for a couple of days. If I understand you correctly, you want to animate each piece of this torus sculpture. One simple way to do this would be to keyframe parameters inside that for loop. However since this loop takes a good while to cook, you have to deal with a very slow playback speed.
If all you want to animate is the position, scale and rotation of each piece, your much better of turning each piece into packed geometry and animating this instead. This isn’t super straight forward however, so I updated the scenefile with a commented animated version you can take a look through.
Yes, this was certainly one of the inspirations here! When building these setups I always look for something that contains all the lessons and workflows I want to get across, looks really nice and is a fast and compact build. Taking some cues from Vor worked really well in this case.
Hello! Just wanted to get some clairification on the expression you wrote for the switch around the 27 minute mark:
How is the code – rand(detail(0,”iteration,0) > .75 – calculated by Houdini? My limited coding knowledge would expect you need to define an “if” or “equals” for it to switch. To me the code reads as “randomise based on iteration > 0.75”, but in my head I’d expect some sort of “if the value produced > 0.75, then the switch input= 1, otherwise switch = input 0”.
Would you mind explaining a bit more about the logic going on there any why it doesn’t require any sort =’s or if statement?
Sure! The thing we want our expression to do here is output either a 0 or 1 for the first or second input of our switch. Luckily for us “False” and “True”, so the output of a comparison like were doing here, is also represented by 0 and 1 in Houdini. So we can be somewhat lazy here and just get away with a simple “>”.
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Learning so much from you guys, thank you. A question – if I wanted to build in each sepearte part of this construct i.e each object appeared so as if driven by a fall off, would this also need to be done in a for loop? I have built something similar but more as a tower structure and i’d like the pieces to animate/pop in from the bottom to the top, as if the construct was growing/getting taller etc. Hope you can help and thanks again for all these incredible resources!
Hey Richard, sorry for the late reply, I had to focus on the Houdini 20 Launch for a couple of days. If I understand you correctly, you want to animate each piece of this torus sculpture. One simple way to do this would be to keyframe parameters inside that for loop. However since this loop takes a good while to cook, you have to deal with a very slow playback speed.
If all you want to animate is the position, scale and rotation of each piece, your much better of turning each piece into packed geometry and animating this instead. This isn’t super straight forward however, so I updated the scenefile with a commented animated version you can take a look through.
Had a lot of fun making this, also learning so much!
Just curious if this tutorial was inspired from Simon Holmedal’s Vor project?
Thanks for everything!
Yes, this was certainly one of the inspirations here! When building these setups I always look for something that contains all the lessons and workflows I want to get across, looks really nice and is a fast and compact build. Taking some cues from Vor worked really well in this case.
Hello! Just wanted to get some clairification on the expression you wrote for the switch around the 27 minute mark:
How is the code – rand(detail(0,”iteration,0) > .75 – calculated by Houdini? My limited coding knowledge would expect you need to define an “if” or “equals” for it to switch. To me the code reads as “randomise based on iteration > 0.75”, but in my head I’d expect some sort of “if the value produced > 0.75, then the switch input= 1, otherwise switch = input 0”.
Would you mind explaining a bit more about the logic going on there any why it doesn’t require any sort =’s or if statement?
Sure! The thing we want our expression to do here is output either a 0 or 1 for the first or second input of our switch. Luckily for us “False” and “True”, so the output of a comparison like were doing here, is also represented by 0 and 1 in Houdini. So we can be somewhat lazy here and just get away with a simple “>”.