Houdini Particle Viewer

Summary

This is a Houdini OpenGL rendering hook designed to enhance the display of particles in the viewport.

It is limited to Cube and Disc rendering. Further display types are planned.

Details

It loads by default if it is on the HOUDINI_DSO_PATH and then you enable it with viewport settings.

Go to the viewport, press d, go to drop down by custom and add a new generic attribute with name "particleviewerbox" and label as something nicer "Particle Viewer Box" and make sure it is toggled on and the boxes should appear in the view port.

Modes

Two modes are available:

**particleviewerbox**
   Draws a box around each particle. The box is affected by "scale", "rotate"
   and "Cd" attributes on each particle.

**particleviewerdisc**
   Draws a disc at each particle position. The disc is affected by "scale", "rotate"
   and "Cd" attributes on each particle. If the "rotate" attribute is not
   present, the disc will be drawn facing the camera.

Build
-----

I've have used this project to experiment with apenwarr's "redo" build system.
Creating a Makefile equivalent would not be hard, the trouble is the Houdini
install specific details in each target setup.

The current build system is configured to my development machine. I imagine that
if anyone uses this code and are used to compiling Houdini plugins then they'll
have an approach of their own they can apply. 

If you don't know how to best go about it, send me a message and I'll help as
best I can.

Notes
-----

The code is compiled and tested on an Ubuntu 10.4 system with g++-4.1 installed.
It runs on Houdini 11.0.581 Apprentice build. In the "About Houdini" dialog at
states "Platform: linux-x86_64-gcc4.1".