eikonoklastes

From the media release: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/aws-thinkbox-products-now-available-free-of-charge/

Yeah, should be an excellent learning resource. Can't wait to sink my teeth into it myself.

From the media release: Promo video: Link to downloads page: https://animallogic.com/alab/

The algorithm, yes. Personally, I haven't a clue what it's doing. Maths and I parted ways a long time ago after she found out I was spending way more time with Pulling Numbers Out of My Ass.

So I finally dived into that algorithm and we do seem to have lift-off houdini_N3ojd2H3fb.mp4 Common Tangents.hiplc

A quick hack to get the outside tangents would be with Convex Hull. Then I just delete the small edges. Have to think about the inside tangents.

They are accompanying videos to the Houdini Foundations PDF document. Perhaps they should have made that a bit more clear. I agree that the density of information is quite high, but I still think he's doing a good job of going over the basics.

Well, you don't animate, so no reason for you to know it. I, however, animate all the time, so...yeah - really should have known that, because it can be pretty helpful for camera animation.

For me it was - Object Display as Subdivision - Ribbon mode on the Pose tool

Or to learn a couple of new things, as I did...

So I've watched it now, and yes - definitely a really nice kickoff point for new users. It only touches the absolute basics, but all very critical stuff. This is the playlist to send to people looking for a gentle entryway into Houdini (we'll kick them in the teeth when they're in and the door is closed behind them...)

SideFX just dropped a playlist of foundational Houdini stuff. I haven't watched it yet, but should be a great primer for new users.

I think (I might be wrong) that C4D just rolls the depth extrude and inset into one step, whereas Houdini separates them. So to do what the OP asked would need 2 PolyExtrude nodes (one for the depth, one for the inset/bevel) in Houdini, but will achieve the same result.

The designers at work threw me an unexpected challenge today. They had me put a bunch of random country names along a spline, with very specific alignment and spacing. The names are being read from a CSV file, and the excellent Chain SOP made the distribution pretty easy. Then they come along and say, "Hmm...how will it look with a line going across the top of the names", like this And it's challenges like this that make me appreciate Houdini all over again. I took a likely unnecessarily convoluted route, but it worked like a charm, and didn't require any VEX or expressions. With the method I used, it works nicely for lower-case text too, ignoring the middle characters. I'd need extra logic to handle sentence case, but our design won't be using it, so I'm not bothering. Scene attached, but I would love to see alternative ways to tackle this. Connect Font Tops.hiplc

Thanks. I used Karma XPU, and was getting 2-3 minutes per frame at 1080p. I have a Ryzen 7 3800X and an RTX 2070 Super, so a pretty lower mid-range spec compared to what is available today. I rendered with 128 samples, which is quite low for a production quality render, so there was definitely noise, but I used the Optix denoiser, that worked pretty damn well, even across frames. It definitely softened out some detail, but I also did another render without any denoising to compare, and honestly, for this project, the loss of detail was totally fine.

So I finally got around to rendering this thing out. Was a fun project to work on.

The ol' SOPs gotcha. I really should have picked that up from your screenshot (it says Object in the corner). Glad it's sorted.

It truly sucks that you're having a torrid time with just getting the app up and running. All I can suggest is perhaps try the installation on another machine to see if it works correctly. Other than that, I'd be happy to get onto a Zoom call with you over the weekend to see if I can help. Good luck.

The Light Shader parameter has nothing to do with it. You need the Contributions parameter that your version of Houdini doesn't have.

Click the circle to the left and Set or Create the parameter. This is a USD thing, likely for performance reasons; hopefully SideFX can make it a bit more seamless down the line. Regarding the UI differences, what version of 19.0 is your screenshot from? The Contributions parameter exists in 19.0.657.

Is that in response to an earlier message? .hdanc is the Apprentice (Non-Commercial) file format, and opening one of those files will drop your session into Apprentice regardless of your license.

Maybe a camera is being brought in with the Scene Import All LOP? If not, try to reset your viewport. However, that would be under the Labs menu...speaking of which: Can't say I have had any issues with Labs either. Perhaps uninstall everything and just do a fresh install? Not sure what you mean with the constantly changing installation procedures. Houdini's core installation process hasn't changed since I started using it 4 years ago, and isn't different from any other app - download the installer and run it to install. They did introduce the Launcher to help with multiple versions installations, but it's entirely optional. Even that is pretty seamless now though. When they initially released it (about 18 months ago I think), it was buggy enough to be unusable for me, so I dropped it, but they seem to have addressed most of those issues now, and I have switched to using the Launcher instead of manually downloading the installers. Edit: sorry, I posted this without noticing the previous two messages. Are you using sidefx.com as your license server? That should be the easiest way to handle your licenses. If you're having any license or installation issues, email support (support@sidefx.com). They are very good at responding to these issues.

This was more of undocumented things I've noticed so far. Another thing I have noticed is that there are many errors in the documentation itself - missing pages, redundant info, wrong links... I'll be reporting them soon.

Objects exist in Houdini just like other apps, it's just that they've built a workflow unlike any other app to work within a single object. Dealing with many attributes on an object's geometry, rather than many separate objects is significantly more efficient, which is what gives Houdini that performance edge.

These are changes I have noticed so far, that I haven't seen in the release notes. I'll update with more if I encounter them. - The Toggle Stowbars command has been moved from the Tab menu to the main menu (under Edit) and has been assigned a default shortcut of Ctrl+Alt+S. I like this, I'll be using this all the time now. I always liked the command, but it was clunky to execute from the Tab menu before. - The Partition SOP has been quietly removed, in favour of the new Groups from Name SOP. I like this change because Partition was pretty unfriendly to use. I wish they named it Groups from Attribute though, since that is more representative of what the tool does. - They went all-out with the new Helix/Spiral SOP. Took them long enough, but glad to see it bundled now, and packed with features. - The Edge Transport SOP has a new alias, "Distance Along Curve". While nice, I wish they updated the SOP to output a normalised distance along the curve, basically a "Mask Along Curve". For now, using the unintuitive method of Resample to output `curveu` remains the easiest way to do that. - They brought back the "Mountain" alias for Attribute Noise, I'm guessing because it was a really popular word. Never really liked the word myself, but it's a nice touch that they did bring it back.