Note: This post was originally written on July 24th 2019.
Today, I tried to make a book generator in Houdini. It didn’t go as planned.
What I wanted to do:
Be able to generate X amount of book
The books should have various width and height
The book should have some variation in their alignment
The book should first be generated next to each others
If I have time, the books could have different rotation angles
So I managed to have random outputs of books. But I encountered a major challenge (for me at least) where I struggle to find how to achieve what I want. The books should be placed at the end of the previous one. The problem is I am only able to translate with a global number and not based on the bounding box of the previous book. I am pretty sure the solution is something like the following:
For each book, retrieve the bounding box in X axis and that to its translation.
However, I am not sure how to make the copy stamp work with the wrangle node.
It’s disappointing, but I’ll continue to think about it and see how I can address this issue.