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right click on any sop node, and click "asset manager". Then click the "configuration" tab. At the bottom of that tab page you should see a drop down selection parameter called "Asset Definition Toolbar" -- set that to "Show Menu Always" and you should be good to go!

No one uses Blender willingly.

​@@xl000 *except for the ones who worship it

Thank you, I appreciate that! Very kind of you to say.

Actually, unless he changed it, it says add animation. It doesn’t say how to pose, or rig, or animate.

It can do things all three do plus more, but crucially it allows different types of matter to interact and mix seamlessly, like grains and fluid. It also can give much better results than vellum in situations like snow or mud being compressed and accumulating

🤣🤣 I can't ever keep up tbh

I personally think Houdini has needed to make workflows easier for a long time, while maintaining the current deep level of control. If pre made setups can be easier to manage and pass along I’m all for that.

Tbh I’m not sure yet. I’m excited to see their keynote and hear more about it

@@mrbennelson they are using machine learning into their nodes, ML deformer and ML wrinkles to get better visuals, like for cloth deformations and and skin deformations in rig without using simulations cache.

I've always seen HDA's as a way to make a generalized tool that Houdini doesn't already have built out, or something that's specific to your project or studio needs. For example, an HDA that generates procedural houses would be a specific project need. Recipes are a way to pass a collection of nodes that would probably be used for a specific shot, or numerous shots. For example, say a studio needs 10-15 fire shots on an interior of a house. You wouldn't really make an HDA for that, but you could have an artist create the unique fire effects as a setup, then copy that as a recipe to then pass to other artists.

@@mrbennelsonNice video! Basically, recipes are collections of node parameter values (parm preset) or group of nodes (i.e. tool/decoration) represented as a JSON dictionary and stored as data assets in an HDA.

@@mrbennelsonI guess you mean a recipe is a more like a template of nodes that can be edited afterward to adapt different situations , an Hda is an asset which is the same for everybody and less flexible.

@@sethart22 right... I mean everyone is going to use these a little different, but in my experience HDAs have been used as generalized tools, where as recipes could be specific setups, or just a playbook for not needed to redo a lot of work. I think there's some crossover for sure.

It’s daunting for sure! Glad you found it helpful

lol yes! My inspiration! I love his stuff and feel like the 3D sector could use a bit of it.

@@mrbennelson Yeah I think thats a great call, I think you're right. Great idea.

I think if people are daunted by using Houdini, and VOPS helps bridge the gap, then eventually they will be able to tackle VEX and not be inhibited. I think it just comes down to learning preference and prior experience with 3D and coding.

yes definitely. adobe is so far behind there are already solutions better than substance like InstaMat.. give it a year or 2 and this is gonna make substance look like a toy. The full context round tripping and implementation of ML on top of it makes this not only poised to be a substance replacement but potentially a comfyUI replacement as well. very exciting stuff

you happy with adobe bending you over ?

Substance designer*

Does anyone still use Substance anymore since Adobe bought them? Adobe's latest TOS said they can steal all of your work and use it to train AI!

@@Create-The-Imaginable I always worked procedurally within Redshift. What tools would you recommend other than Substance? Thank you

Amazing! Thanks Tom, if you're interested, I'd love to hear your thoughts on what courses / tools / etc could be useful to you on the site. I'm trying to talk to as many people as possible to have a clearer picture on where the pain points are. You can find my email on the contact of this channel. No pressure though either way, glad to have you join!

That's totally fine to disagree, and I'd encourage it for discussion. I do feel like the COPs workflow will eventually balloon into more AI + ML image post processing, denoising, upscaling etc that would be very wise for Houdini to lean into. But I could be totally wrong. I think Houdini has a lot of great features such as USD and Solaris gaining traction.

Agreed, there’s a new ML node, it’s coming :)

Amazing! I’m gonna have to try that - will save more time and just be simpler! Thanks!

I think that’s great! As you progress with Houdini you’ll pick up on bits of information and code if you need to.

In this case, I was just deleting the N point attribute that was created in the point wrangle, due to calling the @N variable. So they were old normals not accounting for the displaced, updated positions. But yeah adding a Normal node at the end would also work. So many ways to do the same thing.

Thanks! Curious, are you typically fracturing with booleans for RBD sims or procedural modeling?

@@mrbennelson Procedural modeling. The recently released Labs Polyscalpel is supposed to be more advanced than the basic Boolean, but using it is not straightforward, and the node itself is quite heavy to load.

Tbh I don’t know of any specific sites with premade scripts. You can always try coding your own, using the Houdini hou Python module documentation will help. Also depending on how comfortable you are coding, you could always try ChatGPT or any LLM and see if it can generate some scripts you are wanting. LLMs can be great for things like this, but I usually have to edit the code manually as there are errors some of the time.