Hello!
I’m wondering if there is an equivalent to Houdini’s “points from volume” node in Touchdesigner? I’m trying to create this a 3D pixel look object and thought points from volume might be a good approach but fail to achieve it in Touchdesigner… Please let me know if you think there is any other way around it as well. Thanks in advance…
Perhaps the Sprinkle SOP? it can add points within a closed volume. Right-click the node and choose Operator Snippets to see examples
Ah I see you want the points ordered in a grid, in that case here is a poor man’s version of the points from volume node, using the Group SOP:
EDIT : created a more flexible version which automatically sizes & positions the pointgrid to the input bounding object. Set desired number of points on each axis with the custom pars. As this is all done in SOPs it’s a slow operation, so if you use a large number of points it will freeze TD’s timeline for a bit, so not something to animate.
gridpoints_in_volume.tox (1.4 KB)
Thank you @nettoyeur, this is exactly what I’m looking for.
On a side note, I only just notice the differences in computing power between TD and Houdini… It’s almost impossible to get an instance feedback if I have a changing 3d shape and I want constant updates on the new grid points… Sorry I am very new to TD and still trying to figure out if working with heavy geometry is a good idea in TD, is it something that I am doing wrong, or if TD is just better/ faster with TOPs? For another example, it seems like even rotating a geometry (around 100,000 points) itself is quite laggy in comparison to rotating a camera around that geometry.
In general anything which transforms many points is faster when done on the GPU, as a GPU can do many tasks in parallel. Anything on SOP level is done on the CPU, anything done on Geo COMP or TOPs is done on the GPU.
So try to do all your geometry transforms on a Geo COMP.
Also look into Geo instancing where you feed instancing data from CHOPs or TOPs to a Geo COMP. See the examples in Help->Operator Snippets for Geo COMP and Geo Text COMP.
Then you can manipulate that data while still in the CHOP or TOP chain.
@x.il I created a better version of the points in volume, edited message above
Thank you so much for the detailed answer! That helps a lot!
