 Okay, so what we wanna do now is we wanna go and start to give our plank some 3D shape and we wanna go and create some nail heads that sit on top of the actual wood planks themselves. All right, so this is basically our pattern right here. Okay, so what I'm gonna do, or something that I like to do is I drop down a null node. These are kinda act like markers for me, at least when I use them like this. Now, you'll notice that my null node is customized. All right, usually the null node by default is a square rectangle. And now to change this, you can hit the C and X keys on the keyboard, or I'm sorry, it's the Z key. All right, and what you can do is you can hold down control and you drag, or I'm sorry, Alt and you drag your node, your default node over whatever shape that you want and what'll happen is it'll create that for you, okay? Then it'll set that particular shape by default. And the same goes for color, okay? So C for the color panel, Z for the shape panel and that is how we do that. So that's why my null node looks different than yours, most likely, okay? So what I do is I give this a name. So I'm just gonna call this the pattern. And usually I capitalize that so it's pattern, just so it stands out from the rest. Okay, so first things first, which is relatively easy. I'm gonna create another for each primitive so we can work on each plank individually. Now you could do it up here, but I'm gonna separate this out just to keep all these systems nice and clean and separated from each other. All right, so I'm gonna wire this together like so and now we can roll through each individual plank and start working on the rest of the detailing that we need to do for this particular pattern, okay? And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit poly extrude or I'm gonna go and find the poly extrude node down here and add it to the network like so. And let's just give it a little bit of a height there. All right, so I just selected the poly extrude node and changed the distance on this guy right here, perfect. Now when we do that inside of Houdini, it doesn't automatically add the bottom or the back as it's called. So if you scroll down in the poly extrude parameters here, just hit output back and you get all the geometry. Okay, cool. So the next thing that I wanna do is I want to get the top most primitive up here, okay? And in the poly extrude context or with this particular node, it is going to call this the front. And so what we can do is we can actually create a group out of that, all right? So the poly extrude node will automatically generate groups when we hit these little check boxes for us. And so what I can do is I can rename it. By default, it's called the extrude front. All right, and that's solidified. I do that all the time. I'll use that default, especially when I'm moving relatively quickly through my networks and building up models and have deadlines and stuff like that. But in this case, I'm gonna name it just to make everything clear to us, okay? So now with the poly extrude node selected because this is the node creating that group, I can open up our group panel up here and I could switch this over to primitives. And you can see now we have this top group. And if I hover my mouse over that name, you can see that it highlights that top primitive. This is great because now I can use that as placement for the nails, okay? Cool, so let's go and do that. We'll just get that hooked up really, really basic like. So I'm gonna drop down a blast node because I really just want that primitive sitting on top of that plank, okay? So I wanna blast away all the other geometry. There is also a delete node. Let's see if they still have it. Yep, there's a delete node and you can do it there too. But that's a little old school. I use the blast node now. It's a little bit quicker, especially when you start using the Houdini engine. This node is like a bare bones delete. Whereas the delete node comes with a bunch of extra properties and parameters. Okay, so I'm gonna hit this little drop down here and select the top group that we just made. Now you'll notice by default, the blast node is actually gonna delete the one that we selected. But we can invert that selection by hitting this delete non-selected. Cool, so now we just get that particular piece. And what I'm looking for is to place or to create the pivot points where we're gonna place our nail heads. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use the points from this particular primitive as those pivot points or those placement points. So you can see if I turn on this little guy right here, all of our points in this piece of geometry are highlighted for us. You can also turn on the numbering for it as well. All right, and then there you go. Now you can see all the numbers. And what I wanna do is I want to make sure that our nails sit inside of this. So a really cool thing we can do inside of Houdini is we can actually template previous geometry upstream. Or downstream or side or right stream, left or right stream, by hitting this little template tag right here. That allows us to see what the geometry looked like at this stage in the network. And so what I'm gonna do with this top primitive here is I'm gonna actually drop down, let's just do it in a really basic way. Just keep everything at a beginner level here. I'm really creating these for people to kind of jump into Houdini really quickly. So I'm gonna create that poly extrude node. And this time what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use this inset. All right, to inset our primitive and not output the side. And what that does is it gives me these four points. All right, so now four points. And this is where all of our nail heads are gonna go. Okay, we actually have further control over this. So you can turn on the transform extruded front. Okay, and we can actually scale it in the different directions. So we can say scale in the X or scale in the Y, all right, which will bring it in and out. All right, so we have control over all this. So we could randomize all these values because we can use the metadata node for this guy and randomize the placement for each plank. So that way each plank doesn't look exactly the same. All right, you can go crazy with the amount of stuff that you can parameterize or proceduralize, I should say, inside of a Houdini. Cool, all right, so I'm gonna leave that there. And what I wanna do now is drop down a node we haven't used yet, which is the add node. And it's funny because what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna delete stuff with this add node. So what I wanna do is I just wanna be left with the points. I don't need any geometry, I just want these points. So what I'm gonna do is say delete geometry, but keep the points. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna copy a tube basically onto each one of these, okay? So let's do that, let's create a tube really quickly. We'll go and detail all this stuff out later. I just wanna get the basics in place. And I do this a lot, when I'm starting a new network, I'll just get kind of the template geometry roughed in. And then as I see a need for more detail, I'll go and add more detail, all right, cool. So let's take a look at this tube. So to get it framed, I just hit space bar G. And what I wanna do is first I want to turn it into a polygon, all right? Currently it's a primitive, so it's kind of like a nerve surface. We wanna work with polygons, okay? Especially in the game world. And I'm gonna increase the columns for this, all right? And then I'm gonna add another node that we haven't actually started using yet. And that's the clip node. Now the clip node allows us to cut geometry based off a plane, okay? So what I'm gonna do is feed in the tube into that clip node there. And you can see that, it got rid of the bottom half there that was below the grid. Okay? And that's because this plane is set in the direction of Y, so it's pointing straight up. And if I were to select the clip node here, come into the scene view and hit Enter, you can see where that plane is, all right? And we can actually rotate this around, you know? So you can see the effects of all this. And it does a nice clean cut, all right? A very useful node, I use it all the time. In this case, I just wanted to get rid of the bottom half of our nail head, all right? So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna leave everything at this default size, all right? I'm gonna turn on end caps so we have a top piece there. Very cool. And what I wanna do now is I want to drop down a transform node, like so, all right? We're gonna use this transform node as scale. So we're gonna call this the nail head scale. And the reason why I don't wanna affect this particular scale up here is because when we do our detailing like beveling and stuff, we wanna work inside of Houdini's native size. If I were to make this really small at this stage in the graph here, so I'm gonna take this range or this radius scale right here and make it really small. And then we do a polybevel down here after this clip. The values that we use in that polybevel are gonna be really tiny, you know? Just give you carpal tunnel syndrome when you try to, you know, get a value of like point zero, zero, zero, one, two, three kinda thing, okay? So that's why I work in the larger scale first and then I scale down to what it needs to be, okay? If you're wondering. Cool, so let's go and we are going to copy this to all these points. So I have all these points that I created on our plank. All right, that's where our nail heads are gonna go. It's usually a good place for those things to go. Oh, it's usually where you see them. And so I'm gonna drop down a copy to points node. This allows us to take some piece of geometry like this nail head here that we created. Where are you? There you are, all the way over at the center of the world. And it allows us to copy it to a bunch of points that we created. All right, in this case coming out of this ad node. All right, and so I'm gonna feed that into the first input and then the points into the second input. And there we go, we actually have four nail heads all ready to go. So now we can use this transform value here to scale it all the way down. All right, and I'm using what is called the increment ladder inside of Houdini. All right, and to do that, just hold down, hold, or put your mouse, I should say, over the uniform scale then hold down the middle mouse button and pick an increment that you want to go up and down by and move left and right while holding the middle mouse button. Perfect, all right, so let's actually template our plank so we can see the relative size of all these. And that is actually looking pretty good. You know, kind of going for a little stylized look here. So I'm not really necessarily trying to get these guys looking perfectly realistic, but I want to keep realism in mind when I'm doing this type of stuff. The other thing I'm gonna do is change the height a little bit and I'm doing that on the original tube node there. There we go. So now we have our nails, cool. So all I need to do now is drop down a merge node because I want to merge the geometry that's coming out of this with the geometry that's coming out of this poly extrude node. All right, so I'm just gonna take my nail heads and I'm gonna drop down my poly extrude there and we have our nail heads on our plank now. I know it's super basic, but for beginners, learning these techniques is crucial to being successful inside of Houdini, all right? And a lot of times, you know, when you're watching tutorials and courses and stuff, they don't necessarily, you know, laser focus on these particular techniques. All right? So that's what we're doing with these, these procedural pattern techniques, videos and courses and stuff like that. Trying to laser focus on really specific techniques. And in this case, you know, it's, you know, building up stuff with loops and tiling meshes and stuff like that. All right, so I'm gonna leave you guys there in this lecture and the next lecture, we're gonna go and add a little bit more detail to all this stuff. Thanks so much.