Aaron Versiontwo

Thanks so much for your help everyone. I definitely will look into all of this more and see if I can get my setup running simpler or have a more refined and elegant setup. It feels like I have learnt so much just from this one little project. Now I KNOW this might be pushing it. But would it also be possible to map the clones to values in some gradient noise or something to even further super art direct them? Or is that asking too much?

Hey look I need to thank you again. It has been amazing learning from you. I spent at least 15 to 20 minutes looking at your file reading what you said and trying to make it work on my file and after some tinkering checking everything then realising my file cache was keeping everything from kicking in I finally got it to work. It looks absolutely amazing. And it's all because of your help with those little details I wanted to add to get it looking how I felt it would look cool.

So consider this case solved. I will thank not only the houdini community but you in particular once the render is all done and up on my instagram which looking at these render times will be some time next month hahah. I really can't thank you enough. It's like having a chemistry book and you are learning to read the book one word at a time before you can do any experiments. I KNOW Houdini can do the things I want it to do but the secrets lie in the experience and knowledge of people like yourself that can bring ideas into reality.

I am so happy VEX is making more sense to me too also. I really hated code and even defining a variable or using a fit expression was a confusing experience but now I sorta get all the code I have used in this project. You are really awesome for taking the time to help the noobs like me I really appreciate it.

Ahh that is super useful to know and thank you again. I only have one last question before I consider this project ready for render! Well I guess it's two questions.

In my Attribute Adjust Color node, Instead of using a sexy gradient I have changed that to "Specific Values" to define a set of around 6 colors. My question is can I reference those colors which have names like "Color 0" "Color 1" etc and use them to either reference or define specific and different materials for the final render? I would love to be able to render the materials based on those colors instead of adding material nodes to the objects.

Last question. In my hip file the geometry was really "sharp" in the sense that there was no polygon smoothing or "Phong angle" on my geometry. In your file there seems to be some geometry smoothing going on. Now since I did want to add that along the way, instead of being content but still ignorant knowing that it is done but not knowing how it was done. For the sake of future projects could you tell me how that was done?

Again thanks for all your help. It literally took my project from noob status to dang that looks sexy status.