Converting to DATs & SOPs

Overview:

There are lots of reasons to convert to DATS or SOPs for your data workflows: DATs offer an easy to understand spreadsheet view of data, while SOPs help provide a spatial representation of data.

Converting to DATs is a fast way to see data converted to values that are easy to read in a table. Converting from CHOPs to DATs can visualize channel data as either columns or rows. In some cases, you may convert your CHOPs to DATs when debugging, or you may also use this conversion mechanism when preparing data for various applications.

Surface Operators are a family that’s used to represent data spatially, so it’s not uncommon to convert to SOPs when looking to work with data in 3D space. For example, you may want to convert a set of CHOP channels into a curve, or you may want to convert the contents of a Table DAT into points in space.

There are some important considerations to keep in mind when converting to SOPs. While you may choose to manage all of the attributes of your SOP in a different family, you can also overwrite or add single attributes. For instance, the CHOP to SOP allows for an input SOP that will attempt to match samples from your CHOP channels to point indices. This often has applications where you only need to offset, change single attributes, or you may also want to add new attributes. 

Material Operators like the Line Material allow for the use of additional attributes. Adding an attribute to your points for line width is an example of why you may want to add an attribute to your SOP.

• CHOP to DAT – Derivative Wiki
• SOP to DAT – Derivative Wiki
• CHOP to SOP – Derivative Wiki
• DAT to SOP – Derivative Wiki