Having a bit of a brainfart. Been a while since I've been in Houdini, and I'm trying to do something seemingly simple but can only think of relatively complicated ways to pull it off: I want to create a bunch of polylines by sweeping a bunch of points down another path / backbone.

Sweep (2.0) doesn't seem to want to do it - it'll only sweep polys / surfaces, not points, it seems.

This is a simple example of the kinda thing I'm trying to do - bunch of points (in the centre) swept round a circle.



To get Sweep to do this I had to use Tri2D to turn the points into a mesh, then I could sweep it, then unroll the faces, but it's untidy and you end up with a bunch of duplicate stuff to clean up later. And it feels like I'm missing a simpler way.

I could animate my collection of points round the path and then Trail it, but that seems overly complicated, especially if I want to have the points themselves animated too.

Could probably do it in VEX, which seems hugely attractive but I need to focus on getting the result I need, rather than having fun mucking about with code. Houdini has such a wonderful way of providing lots of rabbitholes to explore and play in... I honestly don't know how you guys get real work done when there are so many exciting distractions

Is there a simple and stoopidly obvious way that I'm missing?

Hi Howiem,

the voronoi adjacency-node provides a fast way of connecting points for the sweep.

Thanks Konstantin: that approach still leaves me with lots of duplicate paths at the end though (as it creates multiple connections to each point, so each point turns into multiple vertices), the thing I'm trying to avoid: your example starts w 12 points, but by the time they've been swept round the backbone there are 50 paths.

But it made me think of another way - if the points have to be connected up before Sweep can use them, just using Add > Polygons will connect them into a single polyline without making duplicate vertices. Works perfectly - after Sweep -> Ends I end up with the same number of paths as the points I started with.

Thanks for the nudge ^_^