April 8, 2019
Houdini Assignment
Fuse and Group
I worked on a Houdini class assignment to make a basic model and decided to try and create the bulb on the back of a Bulbasaur, a Pokemon that is half plant and half dinosaur. I figured I could use a lot of the basics we learned in class to get me pretty far, while also needing to cover a few new things to get it exactly how I wanted it.
In class, we created a basic hot air balloon. This consisted of tracing a curve over a background reference image of a hot air balloon, creating a section of the balloon from this original curve, then replicating that section as many times as needed to fully encompass the full balloon. These were a lot of principles I used for creating my bulb.
The biggest hurdle I needed to overcome was that that top of each of my sections would all need to connect at a single point, so I would need some additional nodes after simply creating a “left” and “right” variation of my additional curve making up a single segment. I decided to approach this by using a grouprange node and an additional fuse node.
The grouprange node allowed me to create a group consisting of the three points at the top of each curve. I changed the “Group Type” to points, since I was interested in point objects, and I adjusted the “Range Filter” according to how many points I had on my curve. By setting the “Range Filter” to “Select 1 of 8”, where 8 was the number of points in each curve (since they were all similar copies of each other), I could create a group that was all of the first points on the curve, which happen to be the top ones.
I then followed this with a fuse node to snap these three points together into one. The way I was able to get the best result was by setting the “Group” to the group I created in the previous node, and using the “Snap” version of the fuse node. When I increased the “Snap Distance” a significant amount, all the points combined into one to create the tip of the leaf-like structures of the bulb.
