Houdini books with applied math

Some books recommended for helping learn shader writing and math applied towards graphics are listed here on a Houdini forum.

They include:
Advanced Renderman
Texturing and Modeling, A Procedural Approach
Essential Renderman Fast

Maybe later I will attempt to take a look at a portion of one of them.

odforce post

Odforce.net has a blog post about Houdini and the HDK docs. They explain that the HDK is the best way to add extra functionality to Houdini, but VEX and Python fill a need inbetween the GUI and HDK programming. I'll need to investigate this further to understand what this means. There is also steep learning curve mentioned in the entry.

PICAXE microcontrollers

I purchased some PICAXE microcontrollers recently and hope to program them later. Tonight I tried out the programming editor and logic software by writing a simple program that played a note. Also noted forum post that the 12f683 label on the chip is correct even though it doesn't match the PICAXE name for the chip.

Blog entry for an HDK project

Here is a blog entry about using the HDK that is about four years old. According to the post, he attempted to get data from a joystick into Houdini. He wrote his own CHOP (Channel operator) to do this. SDL, a game library, was used to get joystick information. The entry contains some steps he took to build and link to the HDK using Visual C++ and Windows. He mentions a plan to use Python and PyGame, but I'm not sure whether that means he got his Python code to connect to C++code because he mentions a C++ compiler.

Actually, a more recent post here describes this project at a finished stage. From the snippet of code it looks like he ended up using the C interface to SDL.

Houdini HDK

Noted that sidefx on Twitter mentions new Houdini Developer Kit (HDK) documentation is available at http://www.sidefx.com/docs.

Houdini has a Houdini Object Model (HOM) that can be accessed from Python. This link notes that together they may be used for HDK development, network rendering, and animation workflow.

From the site:

The Houdini Developer's Kit [HDK] is a comprehensive set of C++ libraries that give third party developers access tot he same API used by developers at Side Effects Software.

With the HDK, you can create plugins to customize virtually all aspects of Houdini.

Ubuntu Remix

Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix is something I'm trying out. Some issues with certain models are listed here. It is free to download. The site has instructions on using win 32 disk imager to create a bootable USB flash drive. They provide a link to launchpad.net to get it. The instructions explain that a CD image file format extension is .ISO and a flash image file extensions is .IMG. 1 GB or more of space formatted in FAT32 is needed. Also, the image is the only thing allowed on the flash drive. All preexisting files get deleted. The bios settings may need to be changed to attempt to boot from a flash drive before other devices.