Houdini: How can I use an HDA in another HDA?

phero

I'm sorta new to Houdini and have been following quite a few tutorials including buying some on Udemy. This is my first time trying to build something from scratch without guidance and have run into my first blocker.

I'm trying to generate a fence which consists of a curve and an HDA that generates the wooden board.

The wooden Board HDA has a seed property which I would like to access in the Fence Generator to make all the boards a bit different from each other.

It seems to me that the HDA imported to the Fence Generator is the final polygon and not a dynamic object.

https://imgur.com/a/uwEgCcM

Do I need to use something else than Object Merge as shown in the 2nd picture?

I'm aware that I could use the Board HDA to generate a bunch of meshes that I can then import using a bunch of Merge Objects but isn't there a way to just use one HDA and then set it's properties in another HDA?

I've asked on the official Houdini forums but haven't gotten any replies.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me!

tigerija

Hm, let me see if I understand what you are trying to do:
You have HDA that creates a plank.
And then you want another HDA that would place a bunch of those planks on a curve?

Is your end goal just to have a bunch of planks on a curve, and you want each plank to be a bit different?

I am not sure why do you want to use 2 HDAs for this. Do you think you need to use two, or would it be fine if you used one HDA for this? Coz that makes more sense to me.

I feel like you could just have one HDA, and iterate plank for each point in a loop. So you loop over a plank generation for each point using loop and metadata.
I can elaborate if needed.

You can also have few plank variations (let's say 3) and then assign them randomly to points on a curve.