Old School Blog

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jeff
I will do my best to influence R&D to both take the entries and reformat in to the docs and glean the example files and format them as example files for the various operators.

The blog really allows me to react quickly to demands we see in support. I throw out ideas so everyone can grab them, including our own doc department.

I am picking on CHOPs and VOPs early for the very reasons you mention. POPs follows up very closely. Then there is SOPs…

As for enhanced integration of CHOPs, yes. We have been wanting to integrate them much tighter in to the rest of the product since they were first introduced. This is a big project and not in the immediate future.

For now, CHOPs are still there waiting to be used.
The next three posts will throw out a bunch of example files for you all to study and play with.


Are the 3 parts of the blog going online this weekend ?


thanks,



bern
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ha ha
with the response from your blog, looks like you gonna be signing your life away to making videos :-)
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jeff
As for enhanced integration of CHOPs, yes. We have been wanting to integrate them much tighter in to the rest of the product since they were first introduced. This is a big project and not in the immediate future.

What would be a possible/hypothetical example of this. One thing I've seen the need for a while has been a while loop that iterates through channels and/or inputs.
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“hypothetically” one would see a tighter integration of keyframe channels and CHOPs. Easier motion blending, better ways of integrating mocap and keyframes, etc.

One thing I've seen the need for a while has been a while loop that iterates through channels and/or inputs..

I see this best done with CHOP context VEX/VOPs. The only issue is that CHOP context VEX/VOPs only return a single value. It's a known limitation.

Depending on the situation, you may be able to come up with clever native CHOP solution.

Oh and the next blog entry is finally up. Sorry for the delay. Just me sorting things out. I'm still learning how to formulate complex ideas in to easily to digest information.
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yeah in terms of matching animation to chops is there an easy way to reference a CHOP from another context by using channel number instead of channel name?

I guess you could always concat strings, or use a delete operator in the actual chop context to isolate the channel, then rename, then null so that you could always reference channel 0 or whatever but that doesn't make for a very procedural workflow.

Like with while loop stuff here's a simple example of one of the problems I've run into (this asset parses MIDI values back into notes). I haven't tried the crowd system I want to do yet but I'm guessing it will be an issue there too (if this is on do this, if it's not on do this, iterate through the channels until one does this etc).

Any ideas on how to do this without 128 chains of nodes?

Attachments:
valuesToNoteChannels.zip (155.2 KB)

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I tried to post this as a comment, but got kicked.


Superb information on lookupTables.
But the audio qualitiy seems to be worser than before?

I have a question:
It seems that fetched channels start with 1 while geometry point start at 0.
In the example animated rock this is compensated somehow, I guess the channelSOP takes care of this.

I played with my usual boxes copied in a grid.
A particles system is transfering the life attribute to the grid points and a LUT is used to control the scale behavior of my boxes based on life.

My work around is to lookup $PT + 1.

Is there anything I am missing?

Georg
this is not a science fair.
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I'll have to inspect this stuff a little more, cool examples … how exactely are the particles interacting with the character?

You can use a Shift CHOP to slide the geometry channels over one frame (1/$FPS).
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rdg
I tried to post this as a comment, but got kicked.


Superb information on lookupTables.
But the audio qualitiy seems to be worser than before?

I have a question:
It seems that fetched channels start with 1 while geometry point start at 0.
In the example animated rock this is compensated somehow, I guess the channelSOP takes care of this.

I played with my usual boxes copied in a grid.
A particles system is transfering the life attribute to the grid points and a LUT is used to control the scale behavior of my boxes based on life.

My work around is to lookup $PT + 1.



Is there anything I am missing?

Georg


Hello rdg,


do you use the copy sop to place the boxes on the grid?
How do you get to scale the boxes? Is it possible to post a scene file cause I got the same problem.



many thanks,



bern
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Bernard
do you use the copy sop to place the boxes on the grid?
How do you get to scale the boxes? Is it possible to post a scene file cause I got the same problem.

I have devoped two or three methods in the last week, but none of them does really satisfy me:

a: I attribcreate a random birth attribute for each grid point and offset the chf() of a spare channel animation in negative time. This was before I was introduced to the lookup chop.
b: same same but different, I attribTransfer the life of a popnetwork
c: I use the lookupChop and life

None of these approaches are scalable to that extend I expect them to.
Some strage things still happen.

I can post a scene later.

Georg
this is not a science fair.
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