Houdini - Connecting Points on a Geometry
Lets start with a mesh like this (with points colored cause why not).
Keep only Points
Use the Add operator (yes, use the “add” operator to remove stuff) like this:
To get just the points!
Remove faces, keep Points and Edges
So we wanna remove the “primitive faces” but keep the points and edges (edges are technically primitives in Houdini). We can use:
- Convert Lines
- Carve
- Ends -
Close U > Unroll with New Points.
Connecting Points
And finally, to connect points, we can use Connect Adjacent Pieces and setting it to use “Adjacent Points”.
We can tweak the parameters to change the density of connections. Turning it way up gets us a mesh that is markedly different from the original mesh we started with.
Add SOP
Add connects points, but in a different way.
When we apply “All Points” to a sphere, Houdini builds a single polyline that connects all the points on that sphere.
Switching it to “Groups of N points”, Houdini builds polylines that connect N number of points per polyline.
Here, every polyline consists of 2 points (the minimum to build an edge).
On more complex meshes like the one above, this all doesn’t work, or works, but with spectacularly different results:
Connecting by Attributes
We have two mirrored and merged meshes.
The “front facing” points are in a connect group and are given a @num attribute such that each @num on the left has a corresponding @num on the right.
Now, setting Add to “By Attribute”:
We get this:
