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Hi! It's a great idea, however with added complexity of the book at some point you run into Houdini having to create a complex new unique book for each instance starts to really stack on computer power and having simply a collection of detailed books that can be swapped in and out and scaled to cheat thus having instances does help performance. BTW How did it go?

@@tomklejne3916 it came out beautiful model I can control everything thanks to your tutorial , the dimensions and the back side curvature , with easy control on the pages count but I still did't manage how to open the book and make a simple turning page animation , surprisingly there is a video on yt for a blender Geonode book example for what I want to achieve but nothing at all to do it in Houdini . if you want my hip file to take a look you are more than welcome :) .

@@tomklejne3916 it came out beautiful thanks to your tutorial it helped a lot , but I still did not manage how to open the book and make a simple flipping pages animation proceduraly . there is a very nice example done in blender the video is here on yt ,I want to achieve this but in Houdini , if you are interested I can send you my hip file

@@tomklejne3916 it came out beautiful exactly how intended thanks to your tutorial . but I still have no idea how to open the book and make the animation I can share my hip file if you want to take a look :)

You should be able too, I'd have to try it to be sure but Houdini just needs the points to do its fracture, you wouldn't want anything too complex as you start creating something difficult to work with, I get more why you'd want to have the original surface from Maya as it can be hand crafted to fit a scene and create a line in Houdini to slice it up, that way you can adjust how it slices procedurally.

It would be a more complicated tutorial on having to measure how big a book has gotten with the random properties before placing another book near it with that offset, I should try to do a tutorial on that in the future. Or simply have a line that gets divided by points and books size to fit within that division so there's no overlap, there's many ways to approach this idea! Not sure which would be best yet! - sorry for super late response, I didn't have a good answer then and forgot about it!

Hey, it's a good idea, I feel that should also work, concept sounds good.

A bit of a necro-posting here :) I'm trying to switch to Houdini after using Max for over 10 years. I know nothing of Maya, but while Max is no match to Houdini when it comes to simulations, procedural modeling and general robustness - hardsurface modeling feels clunky to a painful degree in Houdini... It my be a skill issue and my decade-old habits of Max modeling, but modeling in Houdini feels like hammering nails with a microscope. Auto-welding and smart extrusions (auto-boolean) in newer max versions are so good... even Sketchup and Blender feels clunky in comparison. And to be perfectly honest I think I would be able to replicate the same degree of modularity and procedurality in Max if necessary. Probably in a less elegant way, but not worse than volume (bounding) selects with boxes shown in the video... IMO modeling in Houdini is bearable for extremely simple things, but is HORRIBLE for hard-surface modeling of moderately complex things like cars, boats, guns, etc.... But it really shines in complex procedural models where you can do crazy VOODO magic jumping between Voxels VDBs and polys, copying primitives to points and so on. I think if Houdini team wants to bridge the hard-surface gap they could introduce a fully destructive modeling node, that allows you to do everything destructive in one node, shift-drag to extrude, simple selection-to-action tools, similar to an EditPoly in max... Primitive, but effective for many cases... Anyways. Thanks for the video. Appreciate sharing your views on modeling! Keep the good work.

Thank you! :) I have not done roads with the homes, I need to start a new personal project to explore that! Perhaps I'll do some more this fall!

Ok sounds exciting. Hey, how can I connect with you over a discussion? Do you have an ig or a Facebook?

It's not outdated as I just looked again, the most important part is to make sure you are on points or primitives when you are supposed too be, the sort node works on both points and primitives depending where you put the data in, but its just setting to a random and the $F in seed will give it a unique seed, if the seed is unique it has to change the point numbers, its a fact of how random works in Houdini, I don't see that ever changing.

Thank you! Its an old tutorial now as I was more new to Houdini back then, but I still use this workflow, the more you separate the art part from the topology\tech part they more free you are as an artist to create interesting shapes. For organics this works just fine but for characters... I'm no character artist, if I had to do characters, I don't know what I'd use, probably zbrush would pair well! But I haven't given Houdini a chance with characters yet.

The ray is used so you can modify the geometry without having to be extremely careful with risk of losing the perfect circular profile that is needed to be maintained during revisions, its very common someone would model something like this in low poly, they later decide to more verts in 3 dimensions for a change, subdivide and end up with a lumpy result because when they moved the verts, they lost the curve of the model, the flow. Good modelers don't really need it, they can eye ball it just fine, but Houdini has this power to keep editing easier and quicker. (at the cost of complication in setup)

That's something I'm not sure how to do, I'll keep an eye out to ideas to might allow this to happen. That's a good question to ask!

Hard but not impossible.

It's hard for me to visualize what you might be doing exactly, If you are using curves to model with then you can just put at attribwrangle node after the curve, put 0 in group (to only affect point 0 or your first point in your curve) then use @P.y = 0; in the field With the topobuild method its one of Houdini modeling short comings to have it less organic at times but I didn't exactly need to keep a perfectly straight line where I was going to merge the points since Houdini's merge node has a consolidate seam option that only affects the seam and doesn't weld other points in the geo. Sometimes I plug in other geo into the topobuild reference slot to make different shapes then my normal reference before switching it over again. Not sure if any of that helps!

@@tomklejne3916 cheers, that's exactly what I do will do.