Houdini

Intro

From Andrew Graham:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzEEnnrrpUU

Houdini/animation scripting

For the houdini part yes I can create a design problem statement- "Create a procedural workflow that allows a finished model (from sketchup or freecad or other) to be animated, demonstrating the build process." the animation should be able to be dynamically generated without a high level of skill or manual work.

I suggest the potentially best solution is to export the geometry for each atom (part) as a seperate file, using a .rb sketchup plugin that we would develope. a ruby script could be made in sketchup to do this, or it may already exist. Each file should be named appropriately to this schema- "(PART_NAME, STRING)-(COPY NUMBER, NUMERIC).OBJ" eg wheelA-01.obj, wheelA-02.obj etc

These would be exported in folders, with the layer as the step number that defines the folder name- file path example eg- 1\wheelA-01.obj, 1\wheelA-02.obj, 2\wheelA-03.obj

The .rb sketchup plugin script should export all these files based on the group/component names at their top level in the layer. The folder name this file is put in (which is based on the layer name) would define the step number for the animation process.

Houdini could load the geometry from each file and folder and animate the geometry being moved into place by a process I would build. All of the objects and the animation order are defined in the file structure. so any changes to the order, or the geometry themselves are procedurally updated. this Houdini plugin that I develope could be run by anyone with the free version of houdini. they just point it at the exported objects folder, and they get a nice animation out ready to edit.

Subtitles and build instructions could be later overlayed in final cut or other movie editing software.

That AMD guy-

Sergey Blagodurov <Blagodurov@gmail.com> I met him on the train on the way back to van. He mainly codes for databasing, but I just planted the seed and he seemed excited about the possibilities. I think ideally if we got enough developers keen that we need a sketchup like interface, with more accuracy and snapping abilities, procedural dimensioning to drive objects like in solidworks, and an object library like github with version control.

so if someone loads the latest tractor file, they get notified if someone has a more recent version for a particular part, and they can choose to propogate that or not.

Freecad is too far away in usability for it to do what I think a good cad program should. its interface to me is in a word, horrendous. But if its open source there could be a few modules we could start with for the interface perhaps to get people going in the right direction.

I'm not sure if he's on board yet, but wanted to wait a bit. Maybe you could do a talk at AMD if you contacted him and he could connect you. Would be rad to get some of those coders to help!

Links

• Tutorials - [1]