Tool Suggestions and Ideas

[Andy Nicholas]

Hi all,

So this is the thread to make suggestions on what you want to see in siLib. These might take the form of any of the following:

• VEX Snippets for Vertex/Point/Prim/Volume/Detail Wrangles
• VEX functions for inclusion into an siLib VEX library that you can #include into your own Wrangle code
• Python Scripts
• Python SOPs
• Gallery Presets
  
• Shelf Tools
• Toolbars
• Digital Assets (HDAs, also known as OTLs if you're old school)
  
• Example Hip files

Here's two things that I'm starting to look at.

• Get Data / Set Data VOPs.
• I'm looking to simplify the experience of bringing in and exporting attributes from the Vertex/Point/Primitive VOPs. The Bind VOP and Bind Export VOP have quite a few parameters that most people don't need to ever use. It's also annoying having to type in the attribute name and tell it what type it is. 
• The idea is to have a drop down menu driven by Python that lists what attributes are available on that current geometry. So nothing too tricky, but I figure it would be a nice smoothing out of the UX if we had that. It's also something I suspect most Softimage artists would feel more comfortable using.

• Stable Noise VEX functions and VOP nodes
• There's an annoying issue with many of the noise functions in Houdini. When you change the Octaves and/or Roughness, the range of the resulting noise can vary drastically, sometimes even getting a large shift away from the origin. It can be incredibly frustrating adjusting noise detail on your particle system, only to have them fly off the side of your screen for no apparent reason. 
• This is fairly easily fixed by having a set of lookup tables in VEX and renormalising the output variables. All the noise VEX functions such as noise(), xnoise(), snoise(), etc. will be wrapped and represented as si_noise(), si_xnoise(), si_snoise(), etc. These functions could then be #included into your own VEX.
• VOP nodes similar to Softimage's "Turbulize by Value", "Turbulize by Range" can then be implemented using those functions.
• We can then all argue whether it's "Turbulize" or "Turbulise" ;)

Cheers,

Andy