Hello,

Still new to Houdini and trying to work on a personal project.

I've been thinking about ways to do this but my way would be somewhat painful. Creating curves at different angles and then tweaking points so they are not running through each other. Not sure how long that would take but not looking forward to it.

I know Houdini has a lot of dynamic ways of possibly doing something like this but I have no idea where to start.

Would anyone have some basic directions I can start researching how to do this?


Also, on a side note. Whenever I open a Houdini file I've imported geo into, it seems to lose the connection, even though the file is still in the same place. Does anyone know why I have to relocate as the reload geometry doesn't seem to work.

Thanks for your time and help.

Edit. Okay. Started looking at the wire shelf tool! But if you do have any advice, I'd love to hear it.

Okay. So i thought about this and I think this might work.

Basically (yeah right!) it's getting a bottle to spin around while a line/string is attached to it and as the bottle spins, it winds the line/string around it with the help of a pulley that moves the string up and down to only the middle location of the bottle.

Does that sound possible?

If so, how would I begin?

1| Take a cylinder with lots of rows and columns.
2| Displace its points along its normals using a ramp curve and some clamped sine waves.
3| Take a line with lots of points.
4| Sample the line on the UV´s interpolated positions using modulo along X and noise along Y.
5| Push the coiled line outside using Point Relax and thicken it with a Polywire.
6| Enjoy!

Wow! Thank you so much Konstantin! I was not expecting that. Really appreciate what you have responded with. Looks a lot easier than that simulation!!!

Hope to provide some results soon.

Take care.

G

Hi Konstantin, just letting you know I am still working through what you sent. Being new to Houdini and all its features, I'm trying not to get overwhelmed. Have to try to understand what each node is doing and how you've modified it. There's a lot of research I have to do on my end to wrap my brain around it. I hope the light goes off soon!

For example, on the merge node, I see an error:
Warning
A mis-match of attributes on the inputs was detected. Some attribute values may not be initialized to expected values, i.e.: Cd.

What does that really mean exactly? Sorry for the simple question but do appreciate your help. I'm sure a lot of others do as well. Thanks

Edit: Oh and by the way that shape you made for the bottle using the attribute vop…why do that and not traditional modeling? It looks super technical!…but cool!

The mis-match error just means you are merging two streams that dont contain the same attributes. Most commonly one stream already has point normals and the other one doesnt. Houdini automatically assigns zeroes to the ‘empty’ stream. But you can mostly ignore mis-match errors.

About the point VOP for the bottle: I just had this lying around and re-used it. The advantage is that you can create lots of variations and really test your setup (ie the coiled wiring that comes later).

And in a more general sense I didnt switch to Houdini just to do hand-modeling again. You can use any other software for that just as well.

Got it! Thank you very much for responding.