SIDEFX HOUDINI 10 FULL

The 1980s pink+purple lines are the y positions of each point they don't change, so they all stay as flat lines.

I've left the labels on here, you can see the sine wave motion on the blue, well, sine wave. I've taken a line with 10 points, and in a wrangle set it to wave back and forth along x with a simple = how that looks next it its motion fx graph: It'll probably look super busy too, if you hover over the pane and tap L on your keyboard, it'll hide the labels and make things run a little faster. If you create a motion fx pane, you'll see all the animation data graphed out, much like an animation view.

SIDEFX HOUDINI 10 FULL

Switching the method to animated will read the full timeline animation. what have we done? A geo chop reads by default from sops, but by default only on the current frame.

Go up a level, select the channel sop, set the path to the chop null (eg './chopnet1/OUT') set its mode to animation.

Append a null to be the export location, name it nicely.

Create a geo node to read from the null from earlier, set its method to 'animated' too.

This will be in an error state until you give it a chopnet and a chop out node to read from.

Append a channel node to read the data back from chops, set its method to 'animated'.

Define a node where you want chops to read from, usually a null with an obvious name.

So its surprising that you have to jump several hoops to get sops to talk to chops. I hope you agree that all the fun stuff happens in sops. This is what chops does, not just for translation like the sphere above, but for all animatable parameters, and not just for a single position, but for all the point animation on a complex shape, or all the joints in a rig, or all the things that are changing over time (within reason!). All the animation is splayed out in a human readable format. What you've also done is stop looking at time through the timeline, you can now manipulate all moments of the animation at once. You wouldn't be limited to whatever tools the keyframe editor allows, you'd bring the whole sops toolkit to your animation workflow. Ideally you would be able to model and distort the curve, and have the animation update. Now imagine that motion path was a regular curve in sops. In other 3d packages you can display the motion path (here I've faked it in Houdini): If you could convert all your channel curves into real polylines in a 3d viewport, mush them around, distort, combine etc, then send them back as animation data, that's what chops lets you do.

Chops is a way to model and sculpt animation independent of time.

Dynamic parenting, Euler rotation filtering and cleaning, aim at constraints, IK handles, all that sort of stuff is chops. Feels like this will get more attention going forward, but already a lot of the rigging and constraint tools are done via chops.

Load in wav files, midi files, filter them, generate triggers to spawn particles or drive animation, all that is well covered. The standard analogy is 'audio processing', but there's a few other things chops does, handy to be aware of them all. Well, with the advent of the channel wrangle and some help from discord (especially Henry Dean, who in one video did more to advance chops knowledge than 10 years of prior work), I think I've had that click moment, so I'm hastily writing it down before it fades away. Bastards.Įvery 6 months or so I'll have a stab at it, and while I could follow along with tutorials, it never clicked in the way sops clicked or even dops, and dops are weird. Its the scary corner of Houdini no-one talks about, the documentation is sparse, and artists who understand it walk around in a smug world of their own.

1.18 Generating retime curve within chopsĬhops are weird.1.13 A wave in chops via touch designer.1.10 Set chops to listen to keyboard input on machines without a scroll lock key.

Sidefx houdini 10