Fit Functions and Curve u Attribute in Houdini - Control polywire thickness in curves and more!

Learn what fit range means and the power of the curve u attribute. Will cover the reason for you to use fit range functions and the importance of remapping values.

The curve sop is essential the same thing as splines in C4D. You can pick what kind of curve you want to have. We are using the nurves curve. Then converting nurves back into polygons and resampling it.

- Resample: This is great for reorganizing the points on your curve, you can increase or decrease them, controlling the level of detail and smoothness.

- Note that in the resample, we are also enabling the curveu attribute. (2:28)

= The color sop lets us visualize what we are doing when ramping from attribute and writing down curve u attribute. (2:55)

= Polywire, we are typing our curveu to control our width in the wire radius. So the curve u gives us a value that goes from white to black from one edge of the spline to the other edge. If we control our radius based on this value, we will get one side thick and thin on the other end.
= @curveu*.3 : Will make the thicker side thinner. but it makes the entire thing thinner. We cant control the thickness in an easy way and thats why we use fit functions.

- (4:28) Shows you a solution for resolving this issue.
Creating attribute create: Name this attribute width and give it a value of @curveu

- This tells Houdini that the value is going to be calculated based on our value, in other words curveu = width.

- So then when we add the polywire and we type in @width it will give us the width based on the curve u.

- Now on (5:17) We type the fit function on our attribute create value. So we know our current value is curveu, now we will control the curveu values to fit them like this: fit(@curveu, 0,1,.5,.3)

- (5:25) Explains how the the fit function works. We state that we want to fit. then the parenthesis says that we wan the curveu attribute to be fit. And the first two numbers state to fit the 0 and 1 values. And the second two values state what we want the new values to be.

- With this setup, you can now give the beginning and end of the curve a number you desire.

- (6:21) Recap of process, quick follow for final result.

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