POINT CLOUDS II

A tutorial looking at using point clouds in shading, and the pcopen, pciterate, and pcimport nodes in VOPs. It also gives a further example of a POP network.

A point cloud is just a collection of points with their associated attributes (position, normal etc) which is usually recorded in a file. Nodes in VOPs allow you to access points near to a chosen position, and examine their attributes.

This second part looks at creating the point cloud files, and then using them within a VOP shading network.

Note that the problems described here with iterating over all the found points are resolved in Houdini 12. The Point Number Founds and Point Cloud Import by Index VOP nodes allow you to use a for loop to run over all the points.