MOPs Forums

Hi all,
I'm trying something from this tutorial here:
https://youtu.be/zuE8wP-e2w0?t=1056

In the tutorial he uses a falloff on a grid of instances and they move along a spline respecting the falloff. When I do it, all instances snap directly to the curve and completely ignore the falloff. See image attached.

I've toggled every box on and off trying to get this to work but no luck so far. Is there a new way to do this? I can see the contents of the move along spline node are obviously older and different in the tutorial. No option for trails mode and the create trails in Animate section seems to act very strangely. How can I re-create the effect in the tut?

I'm Houdini 18.0.597 and MOP's 1.7.1

Thanks a mill

Hi there,

This is an ancient tutorial and not at all indicative of the current tools, as you've seen. If you want to see some examples of how you can use Move Along Spline, I'd recommend checking out the example file "move_along_spline_1.5.hip" that's included in the installation.

The key parameters you need to change here are "Attach > Maintain Offset" and "Animate > Do Falloff". Maintain Offset will ensure that primitives stay a fixed distance away from the curve, based on their initial position at the time of attachment. A value of 1 means that they will essentially not move at all when attached. This was the default behavior displayed in the old tutorial. Then enable Do Falloff and start moving the Goal slider, and you should see objects moving along the curve according to their falloff values.

Trails can only be enabled if you're in Solver mode, because otherwise there is no animation history to trail. You could also skip the built-in trails and use MOPs Trails after an animation to create the trails you want. I'm attaching a .hip file here to show you what I mean. I'm using H18.5 so you may see some errors but they shouldn't affect the animation at all.

Thanks a million, it was the Maintain Offset I was missing. I missed that completely when poking around initially somehow. Really appreciate the fast reply aswell thanks again.