Vray Distance - not working in sub object level

[MarkWalker]

Hi Guys,

Please find attached screen shots and houdini scene file.

I'm having trouble getting Vray Distance to work inside a geo node. It works when at the top obj level, but not inside geo. Is there a way to get the object selection to work inside a geo node.

Thanks for your help.

[Gosho.Genchev]

Hey MarkWalker ,

The filter for the object selector is intentionally set to !OBJ! to prevent selecting SOP-level nodes. This is simply not supported as the V-Ray Distance texture expects an entire mesh.
The simplest solution would be to Object Merge SOP your Distance texture object into a separate Geometry node.

Best regards!

[MarkWalker]

Hi Gosho,

Thanks for the reply mate.

Hrm, I see. That doesn't really fit into my workflow. I will try to make a HDA that does that automatically but it would be do much easier if you can grab the node.geometry() from anything and pipe it to that distance node, could that be a feature request? What's the difference between geometry from one level to another?

What I'm using it for here is I'm making a procedural carpark generator (my whole purpose of moving to Houdini is to automate my pipeline) and am using the distance node to mask out the asphalt close to the curbs to add some grunge and dirt.

When the scene get bigger, managing pulling out all the curbs to its own geo node is not the beset workflow.