Houdini - Solver as an Accumulator

April 21, 2020

The idea: Use a solver to accumulate boxes from each frame of a “simulation”.

E.g. we’re creating a reduce function that looks like this:

func accumulate(boxes []box, currBox box) {
    boxes = append(boxes, currBox)
    return boxes
}

To get started, we create one point on a grid on each frame.

We then copy a randomly colored box to each of those points, on each frame e.g. the box is given a different color on each frame, and then copied to the new point on that frame.

This gives us a new colored box, at a new position, on every frame of the sequence.

We feed that into a solver, which merges the previous box with a new one coming in from Input_1.

The “merged boxes” are passed to the next iteration through the Prev_Frame node, which is then, once again, merged with yet another box coming in through Input_1.

And the result:

Here’s what the network looks like:

houdini
solver