Welcome to PathSequencer. This node enables fast instancing of geometry, either from disk or directly within your scene. You can search for geometry files in specified folders on disk to easily instance multiple wedges. It supports loading file sequences in various formats and offers flexible control over start and end points, as well as various playback options.
This is a toolset of various HDAs all working together to make your life a lot easier. Click on any of these to go to the tool specific help.
tvh_GeoSequence This allows for instancing geometry in various ways. Either automatically placing static geometry from a folder, instancing disk based sequences, or just instancing geometry from your scene.
tvh_RetimeInstances This tool manipulates the attributes GeoSequence an TextureSequence use in order to offset the sequences. Randomize the animation, increase/decrease the speed. It even allows you to do it for each different instance type individually
tvh_Initialize Attributes This initializes the attribute required by Pathsequencer. Always drop this down first
tvh_OrientInstances This tool allows for orienting the instances you create. You can setup rotations over time. This takes the speed from tvh_RetimeInstances into consideration as well
tvh_StringReplace This allows you to manually override the paths GeoSequence and TextureSequence create, this allows you to manually swap out instances or textures without touching the original setup
tvh_TextureSequence This generates texture paths on your points or create instances faces with those paths, which you can then use to randomize image textures during rendertime or mapping texture sequences on them.
tvh_ScaleInstance This tool allows you can randomly scale your instances, or scale them over life. It also gives you controls for doing this for each indivual instance type.
tvh_SplitToGroups This will split out your incoming points or geometry into various groups. It can split it by instance type based on it’s index, or it can create random groups for you,
tvh_PointTocam This sets up the orientation of your points/instances to always point towards the specified camera. This is useful if you want to map sprite sequence with tvh_texturesequences and have them always face the camera.
@tvh_age This is created from any existing age attribute, or initialized to $RFSTART it it doesn’t exist yet. Any instanced sequence will start playing when @tvh_age is above 0. This attribute can be manipulated with tvh_Retimeinstances. This will offset the start of when this attribute will start incrementing. The speed at which it increments will be multiplied by tvh_speed which can also be set on tvh_RetimeInstances
@tvh_speed This works as a multiplier for @tvh_age and will make sequences play faster. You can manipulate this with tvh_RetimeInstances HDA.
@tvh_life This is either created from an existing life attribute, or created by tvh_Initialize attributes
@instancefile not specific to this HDA, but this tool generates these paths to point to files on disk. If you outout points instead of instanced geo, you can you the houdini instance sop to instance those instead. Or have a renderengine such as redshift pick up on those attributes during rendertime to delay the load of these until rendering starts.
@tvh_scale This is an array attribute that stores pscale values for each indivudal index, where the index in the array belongs to the index of the instance. Those attributes are generated by tvh_ScaleInstances and applied by the GeoSequence or TextureSequence HDAs
@tvh_index Specifies the index number of the instance. Can be used for overriding scales or orientations with tvh_ScaleInstances or tvh_orientinces or to group each different copy with tvh_SplitToGroups
@tvh_indexmax (detail) Displays the total number of different geometries that are being instances so you can easily setup the scales or orientations per instance