Remove Internal Polygons Using Dictionaries in Houdini

This is a leftover from upcoming course on creating suspension bridge in Houdini. I thought this topic deserves its own video.
Voronoi Fracture is a great way to quickly generate interesting shapes of all sorts. However, it’s not always as clean and controllable as we want, especially when there is a need for reasonable topology. The main issue is internal polygons-when we remove some Voronoi pieces from the geometry to vary the surface, we lose the benefit of the internal group feature.
Here, I propose an interesting and effective way of dealing with this using dictionaries in VEX. This is not the only solution for this problem, but I find this one pretty effective and versatile, it can be used not only with Voronoi but generally with any paired polygons.

[@thearchailect]

Hell yea I’m happy to see dictionaries getting some love 🎉

[@johancc22]

You recognize a master just by listening to his calm voice :) fantastic tutorial.

[@christophebardoux]

Brilliant. First time I hear about dictionaries in vex

[@Genisease]

Thank you so much! It's a relatively new feature (was introduced in 17.5 or 18). People use to complain about dictionaries in Houdini at first, but it seems it has gotten better over time (I guess) like many things in Houdini do. I cannot say I use them on a daily basis, but they have opened a lot of new possibilities.

[@J-NODE-N-CODE]

Thanks, this is great! I have done similar except I wasn't using dictionaries, just "brute force" looping thru each primitive checking each other primitive, but this way must be much faster only looping thru once!

[@Genisease]

@@J-NODE-N-CODE thank you so much! That was my initial approach also, but I had really heavy geo and it was reeeeally slow. Forced me to rethink that :) but there's nothing wrong with starting with a brute-force to see if thing even possible to achieve

[@marko8095]

Just yesterday I did the peak + boolean to try to get rid of the internal edges but this is so much better!

[@marko8095]

gold! thank you