Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Houdini - Duplicating curves

Since the last update on the procedural terrain I have been trying to duplicate my original curve into several others religiously but without much success. The internet overall had been of little help with this as in most solutions the premise was to simply create another curve. So instead of creating a curve I decided to UV all my surfaces and combine the result into the final mesh.

Simple projection
Projection with a measure and curve length calculation for non-stretched UV's.
For the duplication of the curve I tried various different methods of which nodes like the ForEach, wireBlend and copy gave me the best results. However, they didn't allow me the bend the curve farther away with each instance and so they weren't what I was going to use. Then -magically- a colleague approached me after reading this blog and sent me a file in which he had made a small example scene with a curve, a VOPSOP with several point to point calculations and a blendShape node that would blend the copies between the two -in this case- 'blend to' nodes. This was a fantastic solution which I was able to incorporate immediately.

Turns out the sweep node has a 'group output' check box which I am going to use for unique UV sets for the amount of sweeped curves I'm projecting, though I still have an issue using the measure node to calculate the exact length of each individual curve. Somewhere along the way my copyGroups from the copy node are going missing and I can't refer to them anymore.

The interpolation of the duplicates from the copy node is calculated using the in- and output of the VOPSOP.
Stretched mapping as the UV calculation is using only the length of the first curve.
Holes in the surface where the group selection only calculates the height of the vertices of the lower located mesh.

Another few things I definitely want to apply before I start building the trenches are:
  • Create non-stretched UV's for the additional 3 sweeped curves using the length of the line used for the sweep and the measured length of the curve.
  • Ability to adjust the sweep distance for each individual curve so I can determine the amount of land they smooth out.
  • Find a way to get rid of the holes that are currently created in the landscape mesh. I know these are created by a group selection a tiny bit back up the selection creation grouping but I can't seem to figure out how to make that selection smaller.
  • Create a polygonal bridge between the existing sweeps so I can create a selection for the area's between the trenches. This may become handy for the distribution of details later.
That was it again. Thanks for reading.
Pim

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