I downloaded your file, the solution is easy, you need an uneven number of edges on your bevels for polyfill to work, I changed the division to 4 in your polybevel, and the polyfill now works perfectly with 7 edges instead of 6!

This is not a solution. You covered a completely different geometry. This was just an example, in a real model you will not be able to change bevels. Yes, it’s not even about the bevels. The point is that the polyfill “wrongly” creates a grid at a certain ratio of points. And this happens often. You can play with different ratios and see how the mesh jumps from symmetrical to crooked for no reason. No one will keep a table with the correct ratios and then adjust the model. This is a utopia. And in the same cases, blender creates a grid without problems due to a more thoughtful solution with manual adjustment.
Houdini modeling tools need a lot of revision and polishing. Many dozens of bugs. Dozens of flaws. I'm sorry that the developers abandoned these tools.

HGaal
This is not a solution. You covered a completely different geometry. This was just an example, in a real model you will not be able to change bevels. Yes, it’s not even about the bevels. The point is that the polyfill “wrongly” creates a grid at a certain ratio of points. And this happens often. You can play with different ratios and see how the mesh jumps from symmetrical to crooked for no reason. No one will keep a table with the correct ratios and then adjust the model. This is a utopia. And in the same cases, blender creates a grid without problems due to a more thoughtful solution with manual adjustment.
Houdini modeling tools need a lot of revision and polishing. Many dozens of bugs. Dozens of flaws. I'm sorry that the developers abandoned these tools.

Clearly, someone absolutely wants to promote Blender here, Polyfill definitely works on a bevel, you only need to play with the bevel divisions to see what works for your model, it worked in all my tests, that's it, it's not a bug, clearly this is how the tool works in Houdini, so, I doubt very much that SideFX will change how the tool works in Houdini just because you prefer the way it works in Blender!

And yes, in a real model, I would be able to change the bevel, I just did it on your own model, it's called proceduralism, this is Houdini, not Blender!

So I guess the Houdini polyfill tool try to extract 4 curves (u and v direction) to construct the grid. For this it seems to "just" evenly count the edges, so if you have 20 edges, you will get 4 curves of 5 consecutive edges.

In the case above that doesn't work well. If I had to build that patch manually I will have to define 2 curves of 6 edges and 2 curves of 4 edges to get a nice 'world' oriented grid.

The nice thing with Houdini is that you can do it yourself, even tho in this example I manually selected what part of the profile has to be used a U and V. There is probably a nice procedural way to define that set. (probably the hard part after a second thought =O) )

I wish current polyfill will somehow resolve that case, but I suppose it was made with other priority, like performance and reliability over "pleasing" visual result. I suppose I have enough material to send a FR, worth a try !

PaQ WaK
So I guess the Houdini polyfill tool try to extract 4 curves (u and v direction) to construct the grid. For this it seems to "just" evenly count the edges, so if you have 20 edges, you will get 4 curves of 5 consecutive edges.

In the case above that doesn't work well. If I had to build that patch manually I will have to define 2 curves of 6 edges and 2 curves of 4 edges to get a nice 'world' oriented grid.

The nice thing with Houdini is that you can do it yourself, even tho in this example I manually selected what part of the profile has to be used a U and V. There is probably a nice procedural way to define that set.

I wish current polyfill will somehow resolve that case, but I suppose it was made with other priority, like performance and reliability over "pleasing" visual result. I suppose I have enough material to send a FR, worth a try !

Like I said, if you play with the bevel divisions, it will eventually work, having one more division in a bevel doesn't really affect modelling overall!

That's not a good enough solution for me

The real "solution" is to set Custom Corners:



I guess it's not intuitive, as no one even mentioned it after so many replies...

PaQ WaK
So I guess the Houdini polyfill tool try to extract 4 curves (u and v direction) to construct the grid. For this it seems to "just" evenly count the edges, so if you have 20 edges, you will get 4 curves of 5 consecutive edges.

Yeah, exactly, and Custom Corners are where Houdini splits the boundary into curves. It's really not that different from how Blender's "span" works, so not sure why people are making fuss over this.

Well I did read the popup a couple of time, but couldn't make much sense of it (I was selecting 2 consecutive points :P)).
Indeed now that I know it defines one of the uv segment, it makes more sense ! Thanks for the info.

PaQ WaK
That's not a good enough solution for me

Then maybe it is true what people say, that Houdini users like it complicated! 😜

PaQ WaK
Well I did read the popup a couple of time, but couldn't make much sense of it (I was selecting 2 consecutive points :P)).
Indeed now that I know it defines one of the uv segment, it makes more sense ! Thanks for the info.

Same here, I could not make it work, but somehow knew it was part of a more elaborated solution!

In this particular case, Houdini is strictly better than Blender, cause it's equally complicated (Blender let you set the length of the span, Houdini let you set the start and the end of the span), while doing the job procedurally. The only issue here is that the Houdini's document is a bit hard to read.

Anyway it's another evidence why SideFX should make sure every SOP has example files. I don't know why it isn't the case already: they must have some internal test files for each SOP, right? Otherwise how their developers debug SOP? How their QA knows what's expected?

They just need to put these files in the document.

Custom corners, of course, were tried first. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how it works and couldn't. Help is not very informative. Experiments with choosing angles led either to the node refusing to work or to a very strange grid. As a result, as you can see, NONE of the long-term users understand how it works. You say it's like using a blender. I think differently, that in this form, custom corners are equivalent to its absence. If you need days and hours to figure out an incredible Houdini puzzle for a simple patch, and in Blender you spend 5 seconds to figure it all out and get the same patch - it’s clear where the problem is. Not in the user.
Only after PaQ WaK's message did the situation become clearer. Perhaps the node will be rehabilitated. But for Houdini's interface developer, hell definitely has a personal cauldron in store for him.

P.s. Oh yes, this works great. My gratitude to raincole is limitless. Polyfill has been rehabilitated.

HGaal
As a result, as you can see, NONE of the long-term users understand how it works.

I just explained how it works, didn't I.

Again custom corner does exactly what it's supposed to do. It's just the the help text is a bit "brain teaser": it makes no sense until it does.

To me it's quite clear why Houdini has this parameter: the answer is actually in the above discussion. By letting the user specify the corners, you can easily make PolyFill works more or less consistently even after you change the bevel divisions upstream.



Is this kind of proceduralism just niche? It depends on the use case. But Houdini is expected to prioritize procedural workflow, so if it isn't designed like this it would have just been a worse Blender.

This one probably isn't even the 100th worst Houdini interface issue. The help card just needs more examples.

HGaal
As a result, as you can see, NONE of the long-term users understand how it works.

After reading your posts, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that you had no idea that this was a solution, if you did, you would have posted about it, instead, all you did is complain about Houdini and saying how crapy it is compared to your favourite software, We are no fools! 😉🤣🤣

GCharb

HGaal
As a result, as you can see, NONE of the long-term users understand how it works.

After reading your posts, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that you had no idea that this was a solution, if you did, you would have posted about it, instead, all you did is complain about Houdini and saying how crapy it is compared to your favourite software, We are no fools! 😉🤣🤣

I think I clearly wrote that I was not able to understand how custom corners work despite many experiments, until raincole explained it. I figured out the blender instantly, although I first discovered the blender six months later than I discovered Houdini. What is the point of a setting if users can’t figure it out and don’t use it? It's the same thing as not having it. You also had no idea how it works and started changing the geometry. This is bad work by frontend developers. Very bad.

Now I will know that it's better to think twice before adjusting the number of divisions in bevel, as this can disrupt the behavior of other tools.

now I will know that it's better to think twice before adjusting the number of divisions in bevel, as this can disrupt the behavior of other tools

raincole
I just explained how it works, didn't I.

Looking at your example, it looks like you only use bevels with uneven numbers of edges, so how is that different from the regular polyfill, which works just fine on uneven numbers of edges? 🤔

I'm reaching out to GCharb because I know he always have the answers to such questions. In the picture, there's a loop selected by double-clicking. On the left is Houdini 19.5, and on the right is v20. Why is this? Users are strongly complaining about this issue and have already sent many RFEs. I've even heard that the developers believe it should be this way.

GCharb

raincole
I just explained how it works, didn't I.

Looking at your example, it looks like you only use bevels with uneven numbers of edges, so how is that different from the regular polyfill, which works just fine on uneven numbers of edges? 🤔

Like this?

Alexey Vanzhula
I'm reaching out to GCharb because I know he always have the answers to such questions. In the picture, there's a loop selected by double-clicking. On the left is Houdini 19.5, and on the right is v20. Why is this? Users are strongly complaining about this issue and have already sent many RFEs. I've even heard that the developers believe it should be this way.

I understand why SideFX believes the v20 way is correct: since the path always travel through the "opposite edge" at 4-pole.

However, I personally think v19.5 behavior is much more useful. I hope they consider reverting it back (or have an extra shortcut to support both).