I'm getting into modeling in Houdini because I really like to use just one tool for game development. A few questions popped up and maybe someone can help me
1. Selecting Components directly on the Viewport. Is it possible to directly select another object e.g. “Box” on the viewport? At the moment I always need to go to the node view select the box there and press enter on the Viewport.
2. Highlighting selected nodes on the viewport. If I select a node in the node view the component on the viewport is not highlighted. If you have a lot of Components this is kind of frustrating … especially if most of them are named like box 8 box 6 box 7 etc.
3. Visibility of Components. At the moment I connect all components I want to see to a merge node with “display toggled on”. That's ok. I just wondered if there is another way to see all components on the viewport at the same time.
4. Grid and very specific sizing. Our game is more the blocky style so we have rules on how big each block is etc. I changed the grid settings and it's working okish with the snap function. IS there any way to snap objects on other objects? e.g. moving one box to another and snapping it to each other. This would drastically improve my modeling workflow
Yeah, modeling in Houdini is like eating soup with a knife :-)
1 : You can select any object in “Object Selection” mode with the Select Tool in the viewport, or Picker as some people call it.
2 : That's strange, when I select something in the node view it's hightlighted in the viewport. I can't remember if that's by default or if I made an adjustment in the prefs somewhere.
3 : I'm afraid it's not possible to edit multiple objects at the same time in Houdini. You'll always have to use a merge node. That's one of the reasons I try to avoid modeling in Houdini whenever possible. There's a thread about this issue with a potential hack here : https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/31283/?page=2 [www.sidefx.com] Never tried it though.
I prefer Houdini because I just used Blender for 2 months and I'm getting sick of multiple keybindings. To be honest, after playing around a bit yesterday it's pretty much ok. It all starts and ends with a good structure e.g. at a point I start to add the model as a background image in the node's background and then I place the nodes on the related areas … this helps to quickly find the related nodes.
I'm now blocking out everything with the curve node and adding my own digital asset with a combination of poly extrude and axis align… this helps speed up the modeling a lot. I was able to create 12 simple weapons yesterday … not so bad in general
Regarding the highlighting of the nodes .. sometimes it works and sometimes doesn't.
In general, it feels like minor fixes would make modeling in Houdini very good
toonafish Yeah, modeling in Houdini is like eating soup with a knife :-)
1 : You can select any object in “Object Selection” mode with the Select Tool in the viewport, or Picker as some people call it.
2 : That's strange, when I select something in the node view it's hightlighted in the viewport. I can't remember if that's by default or if I made an adjustment in the prefs somewhere.
3 : I'm afraid it's not possible to edit multiple objects at the same time in Houdini. You'll always have to use a merge node. That's one of the reasons I try to avoid modeling in Houdini whenever possible. There's a thread about this issue with a potential hack here : https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/31283/?page=2 [www.sidefx.com] Never tried it though.
I love direct modeling. I'm still very new to Houdini. Sometimes I'll try procedural stuff but not great at it yet. I'm always nervous about the amount of nodes I have when I do direct. Seems people never have as many nodes as I do. Is this wrong? It makes me anxious.. LOL
Just think of your node network as a construction history that you never flush, and is also non-linear… Make use of subnets to keep things sane, and you can always “freeze” your model by writing out as a bgeo and reading it back in. Or use the lock node which essentially freezes everything upstream from that node, and saves that geometry state in your hip file. This is interesting because it's like a history you can “unfreeze”.
