James Sweeney

@MrReedSmith,
welcome back to life super old thread!

I am trying this now and am able to get rotation and uniform scale to randomize in an attribute wrangle.
Using this:

@pscale = rand(@ptnum);
@orient = rand(@ptnum);

Here @ptnum variable is storing the point numbers being used as a seed through which the key term “rand” is generating random/sudo random values.

However I am missing something when it comes to using your example above. I get a syntax error..

–Just figured it out!
I just tried this and it works:

@pscale = fit01(pow(rand(@ptnum), 2), 0.1, 0.8);

The difference seems to be that I am defining a value of (2 in this case) for the power to be with in the bounds of the parentheses that include the pow function. I found this to also be and issue with the above example where channels sliders are used instead of fixed values also for some reason the quotes where not being recognized as valid quote characters in houdini (pasting font problem or something) :

This does not work:
@pscale = fit01(pow(rand(@ptnum), ch(“power”), ch(“pscale_min”), ch(“pscale_max”)));

This does:
@pscale = fit01(pow(rand(@ptnum), ch(“power”)), ch(“pscale_min”), ch(“pscale_max”));

Hopes this helps other folks who are confused by this!
Thanks!
-James

Hi all,
I am fairly new to Houdini but not vfx. I am looking to hear from folks with experience in both Mantra and Arnold in regards to what they have seen as major strengths either render engine have. I have not used either very much (mainly used Vray and proprietary real time stuff from Weta).. Curious what percentage of time do you use Mantra versus Arnold? Are there certain sets of tasks where you prefer to use Arnold over Mantra or vise versa? (Very general question I know)
Thanks!

Thanks rafal!
I haven't narrowed down the problem yet (too busy at work) but your link here http://odforce.net/wiki/index.php/IncompatibleSoftware [odforce.net] seems promising.

I do have bit torrent and I do have a wacom tablet so those are two areas for me to look into further. I am thankful for the community of responsive and smart people here. Can't say I have had any good trouble shooting advise from side effects support unfortunately..
Thanks,
James