Houdini - Carving Lines and Segments

Animating the “First U” and “Second U” parameter of a Carve sorta makes the line appear or disappear.

This is also how you extract a segment of a line.

So far, the entire line is one primitive. What if we want to “break it up”? E.g. we want polylines between 1--2, 2--3, 3--4, etc. We would first need “unique points” e.g. 1--2, [x]--3, [x]--4.

If we enable Breakpoints > Cut all Internal U Breakpoints:

What Houdini does is take the “Internal U Breakpoints” – all the points in between the head and tail points – adds additional points in the same spots and connects them with a polyline.

So, applying the operator to a line and grid (and exploding the view):

In the Grid case, remember a Carve leaves only edges/polylines behind, the faces are gone. Which makes it possible to turn objects into “wireframes”.

• houdini