CG fun pile

Ω It has been a while, time to address some biggest feature requests and add some new things HCollection - is an additional module to Hpaste  that allows to store any node snippets in your github account and have access to them from anywhere. Or, if you don't want to create a github account - you can still use other people's public snippets. You can have multiple collections, you can share your collections with your dev team, or friends, or even with general public by making snippets public - this way anyone will be able to use your snippets, but only you will be able to change them.

Ω Intro: Since some time now the copy stamp node has been deprecated, yet observations show that a lot of people seem to be still using it: long-time houdini users just keep using it from old memories; and newcomers watch old tutorials and learn the old ways from the start. So here's a little comparison of different copy-stamp methods, including old one and a couple of variations on how you can make it with new foreach loop and compiled blocks. The setups will be available in the hip file included, and here we will just concentrate on tests and benchmark.

Ω A little demo scene that showcases how to create constraints on impact in a vastly controllable way The hip file is loaded with explanation comments to make you better understand what is happening there and how. As you can see, the idea of the scene is to have a set of "knifes" object (though there are 2 axes and only 1 knife, that is actually a dagger...) that have a special "blade" primitive group that can stick into things. Each polygon in the blade knows at which angle it is allowed to stick (so blades do not stick on side impact for example) "knifes" can stick into static objects as well as into other rbd objects, animated or simulated. They actually can wobble after the impact, and the wobbliness is adjustable as the spring constraint strength, but it's not very visible in the example due to most of the objects being dynamic and light. The scene is extendable so for example impact surface may be analysed for material type and desided w...