@scale

 I can't believe I've never used @scale....

@pscale is useful for uniformly scaling the instance/copied object onto a point. But what if you need to adjust the scale on a per-axis basis?

@scale=set(1,2,3);

this will scale the object by 2 in the Y, and 3 in the Z

woop woop

camera projection uv, texture reference object a la Maya

A simple thing..

In Maya, you can project UVs from a camera. To prevent textures from swimming if you do animate the object, you must create a Texture Reference Object. Here's how you do it in Houdini.

The gist is - 

• use the UVTEXTURE node to project your uv's. Set the texture type to Perspective from Camera and specify the projection camera in the appropriate box.
• freeze the object on the frame you want the projection to occur at, using a TIMESHIFT.
• copy the uv attribute back onto the moving object, using the ATTRIBUTE COPY node.

filename using digits of the node

 use case - you have many texture nodes, eg. Texture1, Texture2,Texture3.....

You want to automate the filename being loaded & use the number contained within the node name.

To do this we can use a combo of expressions -

//server/jobs/build/ion/textures/flooring/tile_`padzero(2,opdigits("$OS"))`.jpg

where the texture node is Texture5 becomes

//server/jobs/build/ion/textures/flooring/tile_05.jpg

So if we copy and paste this many times, it will update to tile_06, tile_99 etc...

padzero(2, SOMETHING) - pads the value SOMETHING with up to TWO zeroes. 5 becomes 05, 99 stays as 99.

opdigits("whatever") - returns the numbers of "whatever". In the example above, I use the $OS expression to get the name of the node itself-  ie; Texture5, so we get back 5. The padzero makes it 05.

these bits are enclosed with backticks  ` `, to execute the expressions.