> I've found working with Wrangles to be easier
That's great to hear! Yep, as you've obviously found for yourself,
there's really nothing to be intimidated by. Most people are aware of
the various concepts intuitively, it's just that I've noticed the syntax
can scare people off.
> However I had wondered whether splitting things up into lots of
separate Wrangles
> was less efficient programmatically. Do you have a view on this Andy?
No, I've not noticed any performance hit, but I've not tried profiling it.
Each time you do put a Wrangle of some sort down, Houdini will generally
need to create a new copy in memory of the geometry so that you're able
to write your attributes to the new version of the data. But that
happens with most nodes I would have thought, so minimising the number
of nodes is generally a good idea. It would only need one copy in memory
each time though, so there should be efficiency of re-use. Kind of like
a double buffering system where it swaps the buffer each time. The new
SOP compiling feature (http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/model/compile)
would in theory limit any overhead by combining all the compilable nodes
before running.
Anyway, these are all just educated guesses based on my understanding of
the mechanics of Houdini, so take with a pinch of salt!
From a stylistic point of view, I much prefer to seperate VEX code into
separate Wrangle nodes so that each node does *one* thing only. It makes
it more robust and easier to manipulate and debug. It's exactly
analogous to coding functions. Big functions that do a lot of things are
generally nasty.
I also find that some operations need to be split, for any/all of the
following reasons:
* For architectural/re-use reasons. E.g. An "initialisation"
Wrangle, a "loop operation" Wrangle, and a "tidy up" Wrangle.
* If I've adjusted the geometry (e.g. by adding points) and now I
need to iterate over all the points again including the new ones.
* If I need to do another operation but looping over a different
entity e.g. a per-point wrangle followed by per-primitive or detail
operation.
A
On 02/03/2017 15:33, Jonathan Moore wrote:
Disadvantages - If someone else can't code and needs to take over
the scene, then they're going to have difficulties if they need to
fix/change things in an individual Point Wrangle...
Funnily enough I don't consider myself a programmer. Before Houdini I
generally hacked around with scripts but I'd never attempted anything
C like.
I've found working with Wrangles to be easier than my preconceptions
led me to fear. I can't say that I'm overly ambitions with VEX but the
motivation of multithreaded optimisations keeps me pushing forward.
Plus lots of bespoke reusable 'subroutines' helps me compartmentalise
VEX in a very digestible manner.
However I had wondered whether splitting things up into lots of
separate Wrangles was less efficient programmatically. Do you have a
view on this Andy?
On 2 March 2017 at 15:08, Andy Nicholas <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Heh! Yep, I know exactly what you mean. It's usually a lot faster
to write the logic in VEX compared to creating a spaghetti network
of group & attribute manipulation to get what you want. The new
compilation system for SOPs may help slightly, but it's still a
million times faster to prototype and adjust in VEX.
It's worth mentioning that after a job finished last year, I had a
look back through the scene. The project involved a lot of
creation and manipulation of trail geometry. I'd say that easily
95% of the nodes were Point Wrangles.
Benefits:
* Super fast and automatically multithreaded
* Each node's function is completely customisable (unlike
built in nodes)
* Easy to read and understand intention (compared to the
equivalent node network)
* Modularised and reusable code
Disadvantages:
* If someone else can't code and needs to take over the scene,
then they're going to have difficulties if they need to fix/change
things in an individual Point Wrangle
I'm sure there are others plusses and minusses, but that single
disadvantage can easily be negotiated if you make sure that you
don't write PointWrangles with hundreds of lines of code, and
force yourself to break them up into smaller reusuable components
- like subroutines. That way, they can be treated in the same way
as any other standard Houdini SOP. If someone else comes in and
doesn't like VEX, then it's granular enough not to get in the way.
So personally I'm going to keep with VEX, as I can't find a good
reason to stop ;)
A
------
Softimage Mailing List.
To unsubscribe, send a mail to [email protected] with
"unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
