I'm having a lot of fun learning Houdini, doing all sorts of crazy things I wouldn't know how to do in other programs.
But I keep coming back to trying to figure out how to proceduraly make something like in the attachment. It's just a tube being subtracted from a sphere, but the question is if there's a way to make the fillet/rounding/bevel where the transition happens in houdini? Off course the Cookie node works great for booleans, but in a case like this a PolyBevel doesn't seem to cut it… A way to adjust the transition with the Cookie node?
It's a really cool tutorial and technique, but I had tried out this VDB combine technique before. It doesn't really give me the control of the transition between the two volumes that I'm looking for, and also the shape remains quite bumpy and jagged due to cube nature of the voxels. Even at high resolutions it doesn't really look nice for what I'm looking for. If I wanted to use the technique to design hard surface organic objects and use those for real-time use, I'm back to having to re-topologize, and then I might as well just model such stuff in Solid Works where I have the transition control that I'm looking for. Again, annoyingly needing to re-topologize and loosing the procedural tweakability after that…
Yes, you can proceduraly bevel the result of a boolean. Make sure to output groups from the cookie sop, use those groups in the bevel sop. The high resolution your polygon objects the smaller your bevel has to be.
It definitely goes in the right direction… still quite limiting how small the bevel has to be in this particular example, but maybe it's mathematically not_so_easy with polygons to go further.
In any case, this will work for many things, thanks