CG fun pile

Ω Hpaste is a small tool that allows you to easily exchange snippets of nodes with coworkers, and save your own node setups to collections. you may read about it here and here A couple of new features were added to HPaste. Asset definitions are now saved to the snippet So now when you send some nodes to a friend/coworker you don't have to worry about your special assets that the receiver might not have. Definitions of non standard assets are saved into snippet and are embedded into receiver's hip file if he/she doesn't have such definition already. So, on sending end in asset manager you might see something like this: and or receiving end, if the receiver did not have that asset definition, the manager will look like this after pasting the snippet: and, of course, there's your snippet in the network editor, fully operational: The asset definitions that are installed from the snippet will be installed into the hip file, so it will in...

Ω HCollections has evolved from HPaste as an additional tool that helps you keep, organize and reuse your own snippets. If you are not familiar with HPaste, here's a short post about it HCollections allows you to save your snippets in cloud based collections and use them any time you need! Collections are now implemented based on github gists, so you will have to have a github account to start working with them. Your snippets can be private, visible only to you, and public, accessible in read-only mode for anyone. You can switch your snippets from public to private and vice versa at any time. To start working with collections you will have to create a github account if you don't already have one. Be sure to verify you email before proceeding to the next step. Now on the HPaste shelf you may notice new buttons. Click "Collection Authorization" and a small account manager window will pop up. There are 2 fields, upper one - is for private accounts, to which you w...

Ω This is just a small complimentary note for the RBD solver video that is here To feel comfortable watching the video you should: Be familiar with basics vector and matrix operations.  Have basic physics knowledge  Have heard about differential equations  Have heard a bit about finite differences methods  (last two will more like just help you understand some calculations, but not required to understand the point) please, check 101 below the video, maybe it will be of any help. https://vimeo.com/243886050 From description of the video: I thought to try to contribute to the community with a little tutorial. Everyone seem to know everything about fluid solvers these days, so i decided to cover basics for a bit more obscure, at least for Houdini users, topic. This is part one of possible 3 parts. I tried to push everything into one video, but just got too tired. so let's see how this one goes and if this topic together with this kind of pres...

Ω cgLauncher is a small useful utility that allows you to make configurations for your projects (software versions, environments, etc) For now it only supports Houdini, but it can be extended with plugins to be able to launch any application "Project" is just a simple folder with your stuff: scenes,scripts, models, etc you can select any folder to be a project, as well as you may right click on a folder and save it to project list for much quicker access Project is a list of configurations, where a configuration is a set of parameters how to launch the software. for example you can have "animation" preset that uses one build and launches houdinicore.exe with animation plugins loaded with environment, then you can have "fx" and "lighting" presets, which can use their own build, binary and environment variables. (don't forget to save configuration changes to project with "save" button) Environment variables can ...

Ω HPaste is a small and usefull utility that makes exchange of node snippets really easy and fast. You can send them directly through any text messaging application when you add the plugin to you project, a new shelf HPaste will become available: It has some buttons, but the most usefull are HCopyWeb and HPasteWeb. When you select some nodes in the node editor and press HCopyWeb - a link appear in your system clipboard, and you can paste it into any messenger as text. It looks kinda like this: 8BIQqJvciteWgQNx@WePaste Then anyone who sees this link can select it, copy it to his system clipboard and press HPasteWeb button in houdini, that will create the whole same node structure that the sender selected, with all animations, channels, expressions and connections! Note that received nodes will be pasted into currently active Node Editor window. If current Node Editor window shows different context from what the sender sent (for ex. OBJ, when sender copied SOP nodes) - the r...