Learning Houdini's 'Surface Operators' (SOPs)
So after 3 weeks of Uni and not getting back into my 3D study, I am finally forcing myself to learn some things. It's a friday night and I have forced myself to, instead of playing games or generally lounge around, actually start doing some Houdini stuff.
I have decided to dive into the basics of SOPs.
SOPs networks are responsible for creating and modifying Houdini geometry.
Some interesting nodes I found
Some of the operators you can use on geometry are polybevel, normal, polyreduce, polywire.
I found the polywire node particularly cool, as it lets you create a wireframe of your object:
A lot of these were very familiar looking operations to me since I have seen a lot of these things when using Maya, however seeing it used as a node network is very interesting. Especially the speed in which complex shapes can be created.
The delete node is something I hadn't seen before. Being able to delete stuff based on rules, such as deleteing any face that is facing a certain way. An interesting tool that could possible save some time with cleaning up geometry.
There are A LOT of these nodes (as you can see) so I am not going to talk about them all here.
SOP flags
Bypass (yellow down arrow) - This disables the node.
Display/Render (blue eye) - This allows you to see the node's geo in the viewport. It will show the combination of the nodes connected above it as well.
Lock (snow flake) - This will freeze the node's output.
Template (it looks like a little purple shirt to me..) - From what I can tell, this will allow you to view the geometry of a node without the display flag on. So you can see other nodes in effect further up the network. You can only use the template flag on one node at a time in the network.
In summary
There are lots to learn as far as all the different surface operators, and learning about their basic functions one after the other is just not holding my attention. So now that I know what they are I am going to look into some tutorials and fun stuff I can do with these things.
Time to make some cool stuff!
I have decided to dive into the basics of SOPs.
SOPs networks are responsible for creating and modifying Houdini geometry.
Some interesting nodes I found
Some of the operators you can use on geometry are polybevel, normal, polyreduce, polywire.
I found the polywire node particularly cool, as it lets you create a wireframe of your object:
A lot of these were very familiar looking operations to me since I have seen a lot of these things when using Maya, however seeing it used as a node network is very interesting. Especially the speed in which complex shapes can be created.
The delete node is something I hadn't seen before. Being able to delete stuff based on rules, such as deleteing any face that is facing a certain way. An interesting tool that could possible save some time with cleaning up geometry.
There are A LOT of these nodes (as you can see) so I am not going to talk about them all here.
SOP flags
Bypass (yellow down arrow) - This disables the node.
Display/Render (blue eye) - This allows you to see the node's geo in the viewport. It will show the combination of the nodes connected above it as well.
Lock (snow flake) - This will freeze the node's output.
Template (it looks like a little purple shirt to me..) - From what I can tell, this will allow you to view the geometry of a node without the display flag on. So you can see other nodes in effect further up the network. You can only use the template flag on one node at a time in the network.
In summary
There are lots to learn as far as all the different surface operators, and learning about their basic functions one after the other is just not holding my attention. So now that I know what they are I am going to look into some tutorials and fun stuff I can do with these things.
Time to make some cool stuff!
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