wedging

BASIC WEDGING (nothing fancy here. Might do something more detailed later)

For when you want to vary the parameters in something and render them all out.
Eg. Caching out a sphere with different scales

In that nice boring case, you need a couple of things in your ROP area.

1.
A Geometry ROP, point the SOP path to your sphere's output
Set the Output file to something like
$HIP/geo/sphere_`$WEDGENUM`_whatever.bgeo


2.
A Wedge node
Point the Output Driver to the Geometry ROP. This shouldn't be necessary, as you can just wire the Geo ROP into the Wedge, but when using plugins such as Deadline, sometimes it doesn't know to take that input....
Let's not do random samples, so untick that.
Add a Wedge Parameter by pressing the + button, give it a name...in our case, we'll call it Radius
Type in the path for the channel we're wedging in the Channel box
eg. /obj/geo1/sphere1/scale
Set the range of values you want. Eg. 1 to 10
Set the number of steps to take - Houdini will do uniform divisions, so in our case we should get scales of 1-10 if we type 10 steps.


3.
Hit Render Wedges. Or plug your wedge rop into Deadline and submit it as normal.


NOTE -
I sometimes use a NULL in my SOP as a controller for certain things. It can be easier to wedge the channels on this null and then copy the relative values into other nodes, so everything is easily accessible.

padzero to do file names!

/tba/CLIENT_JOBS/GREY_LDN_Zalando_Dont_Change_100713/vfx/shots/sh0033/houdini/sourceimages/backplate/backplate_guide.`padzero(3,$F3-1000)`.jpg


padzero(number of zeros, thing you want to pad) turns _guide.2.jpg into _guide.002.jpg