Sprites are pretty cool, but in a clean install of Houdini you can only use them on particles using the Sprite POP. It turns out, you can add some attribute trickery to make sprites work on plain ol’ points. The cooler thing is that this Sprite SOP concept works in Houdini Escape (which doesn’t have particles). I wrote a full blown help for it too, with an icon and all – which basically copies the Sprite POP language and replaces “particles” with “points”. Yes, this has been done before. But let’s face it – that one’s old.

You can find it on my Houdini page or you can get the asset directly from here.

For those interested, here are the attributes you need to get sprites on points:

  1. spriterot: class: point, type: float, size: 1
  2. spritescale: class: point, type: float, size: 2
  3. spriteuv: class: point, type: float, size: 4 (spriteuv[0] = U-offset; spriteuv[1] = V-offset; spriteuv[2] = U-scale; spriteuv[3] = V-scale)
  4. spriteshop: class: point, type: string