DavidKahlVFX

Quicktip #12 Old Foreach Subnets

Added 2019-02-19 13:08:12 +0000 UTC

I was recently asked how to turn the old foreach subnetwork, that I still used in the floating island series #7 - into the "new" open foreach blocks.

The foreach subnetwork does not exist in H17 anymore but especially if you are a beginner and watch an otherwise good tutorial (They are used in the Lake Side Series aswell) these might throw you of.

So here is an example on a conversion from subnet to open.

In this scenario I used scattered points to create 2 additional points that later form a vine. To do that I used a foreach subnetwork. The subnet needed a parameter called stamp name that would hold the current id.

If turned to Number you could provide the amount of points for the number range

Inside of the subnet you then could blast the points that are not equals the stamp name with an expression

It worked but was not very user-friendly.

So to show you how to do this task I created a simple example with a sphere that I prepared exactly like the island.

And there a basicly two ways to do this. As you could with the subnet you can do a foreach per point or per number.

If you run on the point number this is how it would turn out. On the foreach end block the iteration method is set to by pieces or points and piece elements is set to points accordingly. Down below you can see how i recreated the creation of the line but inside of the foreach sop block.

The 2nd variant would be to use the foreach sop block as a for loop that iterates for a given amount of times. This would be the direct comparison to the example above. Here the itereation method is set to count and the amount of iterations is set by an expression. It simply uses the amount of points that is scattered by the scatter node.

With the meta node you can get rid of all points that are not equals the current iteration.

Both variants result in the exact same result. Each point creates its line no matter how many points you scatter on the sphere. The number loop always sets the right amount of iterations while the point loop simply runs over each available point.