• Page
• Discussion
• View source
• History

From Odwiki

What is it?

Point SOP in Houdini is probably one of the widely used SOP among the FX world, and even more so before the introduction of VOPs. Some people might even consider Point SOP a swiss army knife of Houdini. On the surface of it, Point SOP is a rather simple operator that act upon points as with most SOPs inside Houdini. Point SOP allows user to add predefined point attributes (i.e. color, velocity, forces, UV, etc), which for the most part can be done through Attribute Create SOP, but contained in a single operation.

For certain operations though, a VEX SOP can be faster. In fact, VEx SOP can almost be considered "Super Point SOP" in its possibilities, performance, and flexibilities. Please also note that in some simpler cases where you need certain point attributes, AttribCreateSOP performs much faster than Point SOP because it has less overhead to deal with.

What do I use it for?

Some of the reason for its use may include, but not limited to:

• Modifying large sets of point position via expression function, which means you can use mathematical expressions to modify and animate points
• Allows you to perform blending of point position and attributes of the two input with the same point count.
• Create and modify large number of point attributes from a single SOP that would otherwise require multiple AttribCreateSOP to handle.

See Also:

• PrimitiveSOP
• VertexSOP

Back to: SOPs