Converting Faces to Meshes?

[DeviousShadows]

Hi everyone! I just registered on this website, do pardon my lack of experience with houdini!

I'm currently trying to produce an ash effect. 

What I did was use attribtransfer to make the faces of a mesh to separate. The floating effect was done using the voronoifracture node and the spring node.

I got the result I wanted, the faces rising up as the fire spreads across the object. 

What I am trying to achieve right now is have the different faces shrink over time. Does anyone know how this can be done?

Also, how should I go about doing the shader? Is there a way to make the edges of a mesh glow? 

 

[haggi]

To scale the primitives you have several ways. One is to use a foreach loop. Just use it as it is you only have to turn off the "Piece Attribute" checkbox. Then you can plug a transform node into the middle of the foreach loop and scale the primitives after setting the pivot to the center of the primitive, e.g. with $CEX, $CEY and $CEZ.

Or you can create packed objects from the primitives with the help of an assemble node. Then you can set the primintrinsic called "transform" to a desired value like this:

matrix3 m3;
m3 = ident();
vector s = set(.5, .5, .5);
scale(m3, s);
setprimintrinsic(0, "transform", @primnum, m3);

 

Or you can use a primitive sop and use the transformation there. (added this before it was mentioned below..).

Edited January 10, 2017 by haggi

[Skybar]

6 minutes ago, haggi said:

To scale the primitives you have several ways. One is to use a foreach loop. Just use it as it is you only have to turn off the "Piece Attribute" checkbox. Then you can plug a transform node into the middle of the foreach loop and scale the primitives after setting the pivot to the center of the primitive, e.g. with $CEX, $CEY and $CEZ.

You can use a Primitive SOP for this, to avoid using foreach.