To kick things off, I'm going to do a little excercise. This is not a difficult Houdini task - but I want to test the new Blogger.com image posting service and I want to get things rolling a bit.
I remember when I was first getting into CG, I badly wanted to render a wine glass. I have no idea why. I wanted to draw the profile of the wine glass and revolve it around to make a solid object. My first attempts at doing this were in the Computer Graphics Lab at the University of Waterloo with Alias PowerAnimator, back in the early 90s.
In computer programming, "Hello World" is often showcased as the introductory example when demonstrating a programming language. The wine glass is my "Hello World" and I'm going to make one, right here and right now.
Curiously, one of the most challenging things I had to learn when I was "relearning" Houdini, was how to draw a curve. Its actually quite easy, but I think requires a bit of hand-holding. First, go into "Objects" mode in the Houdini interface:
Create a new Geometry, and call it "wineglass", like this:
Select it, and press the 'i' key to edit the Geometry's SOP network. When you enter the SOP editor, you'll see a single "File" SOP, loading the classic Houdini "Axis Cube" - delete it, because we're going to start from scratch.
In the View Window (it will have "View" at the top left of the screen): click in the window to ensure you have focus. First, we want to go into an orthographic "front" view to draw the profile of our wine glass. To do this, hit 'T' with the cursor int he view window. The window will change to show all four views (Top, Front, Side and Perspective). Move the cursor into the "Front" view and hit 'T' again. This will expand the "Front" view so it consumes the entire viewing area.
With the cursor in the View area, hit TAB. From the menu that appears, select "Curve":
(you can type "Curve" to help narrow down the selection - play a bit with these menus, they're really powerful). The nice thing about doing it this way is that Houdini automatically enters you into "Edit" mode on the Curve SOP, so you're essentially ready to edit.
Draw the left-hand profile of a wine glass in the orthographic front view, something like this:
Now move over to the SOP network editor, and add a Revolve SOP after the Curve SOP, play with its parameters, and set its display flag:
Voila! A simple wine glass.
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