Mike A

As expected. They want to tempt you through the door with one handle. Easy to get in, hard to get out.

Yes - I did see that thread.

Sorry to keep you guys hanging. I'm quite willing to explain. Just very limited connectivity today and typing this on my phone, so please excuse the brevity. Scatter a few hundred points. Jitter and relax them so they are randomly positioned, but naturally spaced away from each other in 3D space. 'Connect adjacent points' so H draws edges between groups of points within user specified radius and max connectivity. 'Find shortest path' (FSP). This is really the key. Get H to FSP between any single specified starting point - a seed point, and every other point. This results in many overlapping branching paths. Sweep paths. Convert to VDB to consolidate the multiple sweeps on top of each other. Smooth and refine VDB as required. Convert VDB back to poly mesh. It's a very Houdiniesque approach…

Found another approach in Houdini : ) It's the program that makes the easy stuff hard, and the hard stuff (relatively) easy... LOL! I'm done on this : )

Not a big problem to create on a small scale, but this caught my eye as a hard and quite Interesting challenge to do on a larger scale. It's one that I thought would be quite suited to Houdini, but procedurally generated, randomly oriented, non-intersecting, Y branching tubes are a very tough call! Here's an initial shot at the non-intersecting tubes bit... close, but work to do!

Indeed it is. I go back a long time... : ) 'EIAS' (Electric Image Animation System) was the last attempt at resuscitation. In the early 90's FormZ (a modeller) and Electric Image ( a stand alone renderer at that time) were arguably the first 'professional level' CG tools available outside of the big studios. Even so, Electric Image on it's own was $7,500* a seat : ) It was used on quite a few movies and by some big players including ILM. Both FormZ and EI lost their way in the late 90's and went into terminal decline... * PS: NOT a typo: Seven thousand, five hundred dollars... in about 1990... so about £17K today ? I managed to buy a copy a few years later as the price came down : )

Déjà vu with 'Electric Image' years ago. Multiple attempts at resuscitation. It died.

@cendrick if you have the step file, that could be retessellated into a better polygon mesh. If you want to, feel free to send me a Dropbox or similar link via direct message here and I'll take a look at it.

First question: Do you have the original Rhino file (*.3dm i think...)

The joys of competition : ) I like MOI and this makes it even better. Plasticity is looking good too.

A premiere tool - but Maxon won't upgrade it?

As far as I could understand, I think it was more about him 'finding a way' to use the cloth dynamics engine to do 'grains' - to a very limited extent - a method that no longer works in the latest version. ...and at 9:50 he doesn't seem very happy about the new thicken tool... apparently very similar to his Thickener plugin... I wouldn't get your hopes up too high...

And change object position, scale and rotation? Thanks for the info I'll take another look.

Indeed he did and I looked at it. Unless I'm misunderstanding it's capabilities, it doesn't seem to offer the option to modify object parameters per take, eg: position, scale, rotation of objects within the scene, as well as material / lighting / camera changes etc. Or does it? If it doesn't, it certainly isnt better than the C4D takes system for my needs. If it does, and I've misunderstood, please let me know.

Lightwave was one of the very first 3D applications I had when I was working on the Mac - way back... in the days when you could barely render a chrome sphere on a checker floor : ) Mid 90's I think...

...and another job bites the dust : ) https://podcast.adobe.com/enhance

Very interesting... thanks for posting

It's not infrequently that I need thicken / shelling type functionality, so I'm slightly envious of this latest tool. For many years I've been using 'Solidify' from what was Maxon Labs and that's been a decent start for a lot of things. I'm assuming the new tool is 'v2' of that? What I do know is that a robust shelling tool is a tough challenge. So well done to the dev's for tackling it. Fortunately there are some new and powerful modelling tools around such as Plasticity - with it's Parasolid kernel - that are a great compliment to poly based work.

Looks like some useful new features. I'd be interested to see how the new thicken / shell tool works on more 'difficult' geometry. It does slightly amuse me though how Chris is so enthusiastic about the 'new' RS nodes panel with integrated node panel on the left and attributes on the right... Yes, that's near enough the one that I have in R21... : ) I think someone at Maxon must have Houdini Indie : ) so many 'lifts' from there...

The lack of Takes was one of the things that prevented me from considering Blender.

Jaw dropping...

Your comment on the training material is interesting, because I was reading the Abobe Firefly 'FAQ's' yesterday and there was a paragraph about the training material: "...Adobe Stock content is part of Firefly’s training dataset, in accordance with your Stock Contributor license agreement." I did wonder how many contributors were aware of that clause before signing up...

The end is nigh...

I had the same experience some years ago. The C4D renaming tool... it can do all sorts of stuff, apart from, er... rename stuff. Sometimes, these things just leave me scratching my head, they really do...

I would agree with Igor about the calibre of people on the Sidefx forum and other Houdini hangouts - a good number of whom are very helpful. TBH it's felt a little like moving up from school to university. That's not intended as an insult to the excellent skills and know-how of those helping out here - or on the Blender forums - It's simply the case that given Houdini's place in the CG world, there are more high level users at high end studios doing high end work. Mixing, however tangentially, in that sort of company tends to sweep the junior users along for the ride. When newbies such as myself get forum questions answered - often with code or sample files - by TD's from ILM and the like you do tend to pause for a moment : )