Can anyone point me to examples of how to use the Guide Attribute in the new quadremesh beta tool? The docs don't really give any sort of "artist friendly" answers.

Thanks!

Paul

The documentation says that we should use a primitive attribute for guides. Here is a small example demonstrating this.

Thanks! I appreciate it. So it looks like what you're doing is similar to what you can do in the Labs Voxel Remesh, right?

But isn't there a way to actually draw curves along the surface to use as guides instead?

And while I'm on that topic, why is it that only draw curve lets you plug in geometry as a projection object? I started to look inside each node, but as soon as I saw VEX inside of curve my eyes glazed over and I decided to just keep working on my project instead of going down that rabbit hole!

Paul Griswold
Thanks! I appreciate it. So it looks like what you're doing is similar to what you can do in the Labs Voxel Remesh, right?

But isn't there a way to actually draw curves along the surface to use as guides instead?

The document explicitly says there isn't a way to do it now (see "Limitations" section).

At least SideFX is aware of the fact people want it so perhaps 20.5?

Yeah, I saw that but Houdini users are an innovative bunch, so you never know. Often the docs say something is impossible, then someone uploads a video to YouTube showing how to do that exact thing. :-)

The guide attribute on the Quad Remesh SOP currently acts as a "soft" constraint in the sense that the quad remeshing will try to accommodate the guides as much as possible, but it make not be able to adhere to the guides as closely as you might like.

For this reason, adding an interactive UI for the guiding might cause frustration. Interactive directing of the quad mesh is part of the long term plan, but first we'd like to try improving our guiding methods to give more intuitive results.

Attached are a couple more example files demonstrating two ways to set up procedural guides. They also show some of the strengths and limitations of the guiding. Note that you don't need to set a guiding attribute for each primitive. You can leave many primitives with a zero vector (0,0,0) and the quad remesher will fill in the non-guided areas. The same is true with the Tangent Field SOP.