eikonoklastes

Yes, as long as you understand their limitations, they're not inherently bad. I have used them extensively over the years on several models, with no detriment to output quality, so I'm not a fan of the general "ngons = bad" sentiment. They're bad if you use them badly, but that's true of pretty much everything. About the ngons that I posted that seemingly mysteriously deformed properly, I probably should have included the wireframes in the screenshot, but I did address it in the post, where I said the DIvide SOP can handle the deformations if needed.

It's a fair point. SideFX has only very recently shown a keen interest in making Houdini more approachable. I started with v17, and things were pretty brutal then - almost no beginner learning material, and a very heavy reliance on VEX to get even very basic stuff done. If their development pace since then (which has been astonishing) can be maintained, hopefully things get a lot better Soon™.

What's this ngon stigma I keep encountering? If it's not deforming, it's time to make ngons great again.

If randomness doesn't float your boat, maybe some smooth transitions instead (play with the settings on the Attribute Adjust Float). And the topology is still all quads of course

Why stop when you're having fun? Here's some procedural randomness thrown in for good measure. Circle Holes without Booleans_MA05.hiplc

Very nicely done. Your setup is leagues simpler than mine. Really like the way you're already exploiting Group Expression. Having said that, you don't get precise control over the number of points in the circles that I do, so I'm calling this one a draw! Regarding the corner sharpness, the Subdivide SOP can read weight attributes on points, vertices and prims. For points, you use cornerweight (this is detailed in the docs). I've attached a scene that also uses another trick to grab only the corner points by measuring their curvature. Circle Holes without Booleans_MA04.hiplc

Been having a bit of fun with the Circle from Edges node, and used it to create this fairly efficient setup. No booleans or subdividing needed, and if it needs deforming, the excellent Divide SOP takes care of business. Scene file attached. Circle Holes without Booleans.hiplc

I'm with @MJV on this one. The documentation is very hit or miss, and searching for "normal" or "move along normal" should return Peak, but it doesn't at all. You either know it, or you don't.

I'm not going to sugar-coat this one. There are many Just Houdini Things™ that you are going to encounter. From inconsistencies in UI, to downright straight baffling workflows in some places. It's what got me to nearly drop the app when I was learning, and return to the warm comfort of C4D. All I can say is suck it up and keep grinding until it all makes sense. Is this the worst possible motivational advice? Possibly yes. Hopefully things fall into place and you can start being productive with the app soon, because the pain pays off, and pays off massively. I spent 10 years with C4D and have become significantly more capable with Houdini in 3, because it just freed me from having to depend on a black box, at the mercy of Maxon's (then) not-amazing development pace.

I think a quick scan through the docs would serve you well, specifically here: Viewing the scene (sidefx.com) Not sure what to tell you about the focal length control. I guess SideFX have never found it to be that important. If it's important to you, drop them an RFE (Request For Enhancement), and explain why you think it's important. They read every single one, and will respond to you if they need more info. As for the FOV, I've never encountered a production where that was ever a factor in building a shot. Can you expand on why you need this number? Please don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that it's not needed, I'm just trying to learn where and how people use it. Meanwhile, perhaps this page is of some use to you - Match Houdini camera lenses to the real world (sidefx.com)

I don't believe Houdini has a built-in shortcut for focal length adjustment. If this is something you adjust frequently, you can drag the Focal Length parameter (by its label) into the viewport and get a HUD slider for it.

There are ways to mitigate the mess, but that's not the correct approach, for sure, and you'll have to get into Python likely to address it. The better way is to import into SOPs, and use the name attribute to select and process your pieces. It does require a bit of research and a unique approach, but Houdini is extremely efficient at dealing with pieces via attributes.

The scaling (pscale) and rotation (orient, N, rot) are attributes that can be added to the points, that can be exploited down the line by certain nodes (like Copy to Points). The points themselves aren't being rotated or scaled. Keeping with the Copy to Points example, the copies get their positions from the points. Where do the points get their positions from? From wherever you want. Sticking them to a surface is one way to deform them. From that situation, you have described one way of moving the points (along the normals of the scatter surface). What if that's not what is needed though? What if the positions just need to be jittered a bit? Or slid along the surface? Or move along a separately defined vector? Rather than account for every possible way to move the points and build that into a bloated Scatter node, you can use any tool post-Scatter to do that that can deform the points (or pre-Scatter to deform the surface that you are scattering on). That's the reason we didn't mention a solution to transform the points before, because you didn't mention how the points are supposed to move.

Why is it a workaround? The Scatter node is designed specifically to scatter points on a surface. Otherwise you're just creating points in space, and there are other ways to do that if you want.

The points are being scattered on the surface you choose. To translate them, deform the surface itself, and the points will follow.

If your asset has a bunch of sub-objects, if you bring them in via the standard FBX import, you're going to have a bad time, because you'll end up with a million nodes that are impossible to work with effectively. The better way is to bring the object in via SOPs (as a single File node) and exploit the name attribute to isolate and edit your objects. If you can share a model, or a part of a model, we can look at how best to work with it.

Here is the result I got, and it being Houdini, of course you have to add the extras like variable thickness in the middle and variable radii for the pillars. It's also entirely procedural, so all these can be changed on the fly - Number of pillars Thickness range for the middle The entire shape of the pillar is driven by a ramp, so it can be adjusted for different looks Height of the ceiling (everything will stretch to adapt) Density of the pillar distribution Width and depth of the area The scene file is also attached. I'm happy to field questions about how it's built, or preferably, see someone do a better version. Organic Shape.hiplc

I saw the below image in this C4D post, and found it to be an interesting exercise.

A parameter that references a node will usually have a button that will take you to that node's parameters. If you're talking about a channel reference, then you can visualise the link by enabling an option:

Quick note on this. Prims do have a position attribute. It's just hidden and it's read only. You can absolutely get the position of a prim in a Primitive VOP from the P output, or in a Primitive Wrangle by querying @P. You can only set position on points, which is why the displacement doesn't work when running over Primitives.

I think my tone got lost over the interwebz. When I said I definitely will not be stealing those tools for my benefit, I meant I definitely will be stealing them. They look too useful to not at least play with to see the potential usage. Now I'm off to hunt for some warez sites to a find a working Blender crack.

Not sure what this thread has morphed into, but as a Houdini user it has definitely piqued my interest into looking at Blender to um...inspire myself with these tools. Definitely not steal.

Digging into the memory archives here because it's been a while, but I always liked the ability in the Object Manager to set any sub-hierarchy as the root. It helped a lot with scene management. It had a handy shortcut as well (Ctrl+Alt+click or something).

Yes, pretty much all other DCCs have this. I think 3ds Max and C4D were the last ones to finally get it. Houdini and Softimage XSI (RIP) have had this since pretty much forever. Maya added theirs in the mid-2000s.

I did use a pretty standard example there. Below is a better example. In that, I'm using a noise map to drive the inset amount per face. Houdini's Extrude tool allows you to optionally remove the front faces post-extrude, so you get the holes for free. To drive the point further, once you have a per-element attribute, you can do pretty much what you want with it - obvious candidates are per-face colour, scale, rotate, extrudes, etc., but you can also use it to drive density if you want to scatter some objects on there, or if you're simming, drive per-face friction, bounce, mass, etc. You can also exploit the attributes for very precise selections, so you can group all faces that have a value of < 0.5 say, and then do a subdivide (for example) on only those. The sky's the limit really.