Something I do all the time in SI, and just wondering if there's an easy way to do it in Houdini: Say, for instance I have several objects in the scene and want to grab a selection of verts across multiple objects and transform them as a set, but still keep the objects nicely separated. In SI even with multiple objects selected it would simply add a ‘MoveComponent’ op to each object. This is especially useful when UV editing because I can have a character with dozens of separate objects, then simply select all the objects, go to the UV editor and adjust the UVs for all objects in one fell swoop - totally useful for manually packing UVs and such.

It seems in Houdini, I'd have to use merge sops to temporarily combine geometry, then make my combined edit, then somehow extract or unmerge, which is a pretty messy way to do it. Am I just totally missing something or is there a different workflow for this kind of thing?

It's not the same thing but you can make handles persistent so you can edit mult-object geometry level operations at the Object level.

RMB on a handle/Persistant

Long time request, maybe with some pressure from you guys and the desire to update the modelling set this will finally come into the land of the possible

I find this an insanely important feature. Here is one example that constantly comes up at work:
I have an outdoor environment with a road, a curb, a sidewalk, another curb and grass. Now I need to shift a section of the sidewalk, which will affect all the mentioned objects (otherwise there would be gaps after I change the sidewalk). So I select all objects, select all their relevant vertices and move them all at the same time, no gaps appear.

In a perfect world the sidewalk would be procedural, but due to all the exchanging of data we have to do this is not possible. And it's just one example anyhow, regardless of what I model I use the functionality it all the time.

…glad to hear I'm not the only one who finds this functionality useful. Honestly, I never gave it a second thought in SI because it just seemed natural - seemed weird how much I was struggling in Houdini to try to do the same thing.

Chris TC is correct, in that - if the scene was modeled procedurally, all objects would be related back to some source geo node that you could edit and ripple the rest down the chain, but I'm sure there are many situations where this wouldn't be the case, for example if the geometry is a set of imported obj's created outside of Houdini.

Not to say that you can't do it now in Houdini but it does take some setting up that could be avoided.

Objectmerge all objects into one, edit there, objectmerge back into all the source objects.

Easy enough to setup as a shelf script but much cleaner if it were built in.

hi,
i just found this by accident:

you can hold alt to select points in other nodes. and shift+alt to select multiple points in different nodes. after moving them it will merge them nodes together.

Chris_TC
I find this an insanely important feature. Here is one example that constantly comes up at work:
I have an outdoor environment with a road, a curb, a sidewalk, another curb and grass. Now I need to shift a section of the sidewalk, which will affect all the mentioned objects (otherwise there would be gaps after I change the sidewalk). So I select all objects, select all their relevant vertices and move them all at the same time, no gaps appear.

In a perfect world the sidewalk would be procedural, but due to all the exchanging of data we have to do this is not possible. And it's just one example anyhow, regardless of what I model I use the functionality it all the time.

Yes, the road can be procedural naturally. But, you can also approach it where there is a single “Street” object containing the road, the curb and the sidewalk. Utilizing oranizational objects like netboxes, node layouts and groups inside one Object. If you have to change it destructively down the line, add an Edit SOP at the end of the chain after a merge to change everything.

It can fall far from elegance quickly and be a dangerous road (no pun intended) where you may catch yourself making an entire city in one object. But I feel segments of that City are sometimes logical to have in one object.

I still hope also this functionnality.

Sincerely, for example select two or more objects, then select some points together from all objects and move them seems to be a really basic request.

An sop operator will just be automatically generated in all these objects impacted (like actually with one object).
And there nothing incompatible with the procedural philosophy.

When I got into 3d, I started with 3dsMax as that was available at the Uni and was the most popular. I accepted the fact that you cannot edit multiple objects (unless you applied an edit poly modifier) as if it was a law of nature.
When I later got into XSI and discovered that it was a limitation specific to 3dsMax, for a few days I walked stepping on my jaw. Had the same experience, but * (-1), once I put my hands on Houdini and discovered its 3dsMax-esque style of object editing. Now that I'm thinking about this, at least in 3dsMax there was an available albeit backwards workflow for editing multiple objects at once.

Bumping up this thread.
The lack of multiobject editing is probably the top most reason why I don't use Houdini to create geometry.
However I have no doubt that the SideFX geniuses are already working on cracking that nut. I seriously hope that apart from creating more tools like the polydraw node, all those “little” quality of life issues when working with geo in the viewport get more attention.
I am still using SI because still no other app today is anywhere near it's efficiency. H is the most promising but even knowing it is going the right direction I feel the steps are so small that it might be overtaken by blender some day in the area of modelling.

Gyroscope
Yes, the road can be procedural naturally. But, you can also approach it where there is a single “Street” object containing the road, the curb and the sidewalk. Utilizing oranizational objects like netboxes, node layouts and groups inside one Object. If you have to change it destructively down the line, add an Edit SOP at the end of the chain after a merge to change everything.

What if your models are supposed to be in different hierarchies? You can in theory put everything in one object all the time in any software. The reason that is not being done is efficiency. Selecting parts and managing large scenes and render passes requires separate objects.
Most of the time merging everything is just not an option. Just as being procedural is not required for most models.

I find this problem, too.
Apart from tools like Polydraw(which is useful but still can't compare to the Polygon Pen tool in C4D), I feel like I need small things more like edit multiple point in the Curve Node or the Add Node or a real Bezier curve tool like in Photoshop with control handles.
SideFX just need to put much work in the study of user friendly if they REALLY want to make Houdini an all-in-one application.

Yes, please ! Very frustrating.

Seems to be true what they say: everyday simple stuff is hard in Houdini, but complicated stuff is easy. Unfortunately most of my work is not very complicated.

After holding on to Soft as long as possible I'm finally trying to make made the jump to Houdini. Just to find a lot of really basic simple functionalities we took for granted in Soft, to be really convoluted and hard in the Houdini world.

How much easier life would be if stuff like this were fixed.

file a RFE, that's the best way to let seidefx know you need this.

I get that it's probably a deceivingly tricky thing to achieve due to the nature of Houdini but, maybe they could do it by allowing you to multi select a few edit nodes and edit them at once?

This is something I always come across while modelling in Houdini, and I really enjoy modelling in Houdini. It would be great to get a fix. It's one of those things that you shouldn't have to think about so hard, but you end up having to fully plan doing the tiniest of edits.

Just installed Houdini 18…..BUMP !!

Also, why still no multi select in the Tree View ?!

What do you mean by “multi select in tree view”?

I mean I can only select a single object in the tree view. ( see attachment ) I can multi select objects in the Network Editor or Scene View just fine, but the Tree View doesn't show the same selection.

I use the Tree View quite a lot to navigate around because it's much faster switching between objects, output, materials etc then using the dropdown in the Network Editor. Besides, you can drag and drop materials from the Tree View, that's also much faster then assigning them in the Object Menu.

Now I have to switch between the Tree View and Network Editor the whole time for different operations which seems a little silly.

Yeah that doesn’t seem right.