Relative Reference for the Lazy in Houdini

[@luciofreitas4280]

That's really great, man! I'll definitely use this workflow in future projects. Thanks.

[@MichaelStarkTV]

Awesome! It's one of those things that doesn't seem like a big deal and is kind of obvious. But then when you see how powerful it can be, it's a big help. I literally use this all the time so that I don't have to constantly go searching for nodes to change parameters. I'm glad I could help!

[@massimobaita7178]

Thank You very much, Michael!

[@MichaelStarkTV]

You're welcome, Massimo! :D

[@anaelbelle5499]

Super useful ! Thanks for the tutorial ! BTW I'm quite new to Houdini and the thing that bothers me the most is the "hidden" expressions you can type or copy/paste in parameters to reference other nodes (like your conditional "if" you used at 9:26), or how to re-use values from nodes with VEX inside wrangles. Where do you find the cheat sheets for those ??

[@MichaelStarkTV]

You can look up the Houdini VEX documentation. It’s online. But it’s not the most user friendly thing. In Houdini, you can write expressions in pretty much any place that has an input. All I did at that time stamp was paste the expression from another input. Also, using attributes is a way to re-use values. Let’s say you always want to reference the frame number. You can create an attribute called I@currentFrame(just made that up) - as long as it’s passed into the wrangle you can reference it. If you want to reference it somewhere else you could do i@currentFrame = chi(“currentFrame”); then in the slider that is created you could write $F and then copy that input to anywhere else. There’s many ways to do it. Ultimately you’re just copying data over - which pretty much means “what am I copying and where am I copying it from?”

[@anaelbelle5499]

@@MichaelStarkTV Ty for you answer ! Yeah I understand attributes are a big thing to pass data with but they are limited to context. Since any kind of expression can be written almost anywhere I guess my main concern has now become syntax ^^

[@pawpotsRS]

how can you convert absolute to relatives reference?

[@jadtiya]

I forgot from where i copied relative reference, how can i know the source location. It's only shows "ch(../../switch)"!

[@MichaelStarkTV]

middle mouse click