Hi,

New to Houdini and loving the procedural aspect of it.

I'm currently working on a practice project where I'm fracturing a portion of a sphere.

What I've done is taken a sphere, added a scatter and a voronoifracture and then added a group and a couple of delete nodes.

One delete node is for the static pieces, the other delete node is for the piece I am fracturing.

What I want to do is to be able to reference the PASSIVE_GEOMETRY node (null for reference) up one level so I can have everything be procedural.

What is the best practice to do this and am I on the right track?

not sure what you mean by reference the PASSIVE_GEOMETRY node…up one level"
what are you trying to do?

What I'm trying to do is keep everything procedural so I can use a single piece of geometry along with a scatter node and a couple of delete nodes to differentiate between the area I want to be static and the area I want to be dynamic.

I have a null that I put at the end of the static_pieces chain of nodes and was hoping to somehow reference that ‘selection’ somewhere ‘above’ the network so I could use the RBD Fracture shelf tool on the sphere_fracture and not mess up my static pieces.

Maybe I'm overthinking it.

I'm new to Houdini so I don't know how things work and the best way to accomplish something. I come from a programming background so understanding the procedural-ness of Houdini is fairly easy and exciting.

that file is not loading for me
do you remember when you downloaded and installed that version of Houdini?
we've had some issues with corrupted installers over the weekend - it's possible that the saved file isn't being written properly

or maybe try zipping the file and uploading it again

thanks

ok we fixed the file - it got corrupted on upload….

if I'm understanding you correctly…
you want to use the RBD Fracture shelf tool on the sphere_fracture and have it not effect the PASSIVE_GEOMETRY…
in the sphere_fracture object just make sure that you put the Display Flag on the branch you want to be used for the fracture

check out the file - I've made a few little changes

HTH

Thanks for that.

So, how do I work it so I can still use/display the geometry of my static pieces using the same sphere?

My goal is to be able to use a piece of geometry, created or imported, fracture it into big pieces, then decide what is static, what is dynamic.

I want to be able to reference the static pieces for other operations that I might want to do.

That way, I'll have an asset I can use for multiple things.

Thanks,

Jim

you might want to create an HDA that has a top level parameter that allows you to pick/list the groups that should be static and those that should be dynamic