Hello. I am anticipating moving from the now defunct Modo to Houdini. I know about Modeler 2025 and it looks good. My question is, I build mostly low poly models for realtime engines. Can Houdini create smoothing groups? If not what may be a workaround? It is extremely important in low poly workflows. Thank you for your time and assistance.

Thank you,

Gary Haus

What do you mean by saying that it's "defunct"? Was Modo discontinued by the Foundry?

Anyway, to answer your question, you can apply Normal SOP (set to vertices) to a selection of primitives (faces). This should get you the same result as setting up a single smoothing group in Modo/3DS.

EDIT: To answer my own question... Holy cow, it is indeed defunct:
https://youtu.be/TIGpzLKAcDk [youtu.be]
What a way go shut down a software with 20 years of history... There was a point in time, not so long ago, when I was about to purchase a Modo license, and thank God that I didn't. But yeah, when you are bought by a corp, you usually end up like this, so I'm not surprised by this turn of events. I just pity the people who invested their time in the program.

Thanks for the response. It has been a very long time since I have done any real work in Houdini(mostly VFX). 2008 I think was last time. I appreciate the response, thank you.

Yes, I have been using Modo since V1 all the way back in 2004, after switching from Maya and before that PowerAnimator and Wavefront/TDS Explorer. Truly a bummer considering how great Modo/was is in destructive modeling...

If you have any tutorials/or anything related to your suggestion, that would be greatly appreciated. At this point I will miss the precision modeling and tools in Modo, but I am ready to dive back into Houdini.

Thank you,

Gary

Just a heads-up that Modeller is currently on sale (a once-a-year event)... see: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/98767/ [www.sidefx.com]

I've watched a modo video about smoothing groups and it looks like, that they are seperating the borders between the groups. In fact, if an edge is between two different groups (only two groups at once), it should be a hard edge. There are many ways to define/modify groups in houdini (procedurally/manually) but I've no idea if there is an inbuild function already to extract the borders between the groups (similar to modo).
Fortunately you can create workarounds (using VEX) almost always, if there is not the right feature available.
If interested I've created a (more experimental)file, where you can extract the borders (edges) from all existing groups, if the edge has exactly two different groups as border primitives and nothing else.