Card / Billboard Generator
Basic Functions: how many edges do you want in your card; how deeply should the tool search for the smallest possible configuration; and a 2d poly expand for padding.
Because the tool uses existing edges (well, edges from a shrinkwrap) as the starting point, some inputs will generate oversized cards. To mitigate this, I've added some controls and extra steps that can 'soften' the edges, giving the solver more options.
Showing that you don't have to stick to the cardinal axes, but really this is SideFX's Extract Silhouette node doing the heavy lifting.
It's always fun to make things unnecessarily performant, but again it's the Extract Silhouette and Shrinkwrap nodes' already-excellent performance that allows this.
HDA UI
This is a little tool I created in Houdini to help me quickly create cards or custom billboards, especially useful for creating foliage cards that need to both minimize overdraw and be very tri-efficient. It allows me to set a desired amount of edges and then tries to find the smallest possible shape with that amount of edges that still describes the shape accurately.
I'm able to control the view angle, the edge amount, a search depth function and padding. There are also controls that become useful for certain edge cases, including resampling the curve which can provide a different and more varied set of edges to work from, at the cost of a little accuracy.
I've also built the process-intensive search function to be compilable, though compiling only seems to benefit extremely high search depths with lots of edges. I think 99% of the time, running it uncompiled will in fact yield better performance. So it goes.
I should say that whilst this was a lot of fun to problem solve, I'm not an engineer so if anyone can show me a better method to find these cards please tell me.
