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Yep, lower your particle separation and re-sim before surfacing again.

You could check out Sohey's original bug swarm, prior to the Crowd System's release. It still works. Just depends on if you're exploring Houdini's toolset or trying to solve for a shot.

I really hope the SideFX team adds talking characters and more crowd-based setups. What about a traffic simulation preset or a practical quadruped/insect setup.

It is easier to control if you used packed RBDs. Then you can overwrite the v@v attribute. Add an Assemble dop before the dopnetwork and check Create Packed Primitives.

Keep them away from the edge of the terrain. That bug is heading off the grid, so it has an invalid orientation.

Create a long line with many points and use the Ray node to conform it to a terrain. Then use a path deform to slide the the snake geometry along the path.

Under the advanced tab, try turning off use Pre configured Setup.

That's odd. Your example file works for me unchanged. One thing to remember, is once you dive inside the DOPNet, your f@temperature point attribute no longer exists. It becomes voxel data. Try removing the f and just reference @temperature. Try this code. in your gas wrangle. This is actually a cure for mushrooming velocity. @vel *= @temperature;

I worked my way through the spiral particle galaxy tutorial on SideFX. Here is the HIP file for part-1. ap_galaxy_particles_tut_061725.hiplc

Perhaps you could leverage FLIP viscosity hardening over time?

Here's a HIP file that demonstrates FLIP viscosity hardening over time. ap_flip_viscosity_stack_harden_100920.hiplc

Here's a couple older links on the topic.

If you're running below spec, (i.e. less than 12GB vRAM) you might consider using the OpenGL rop in the /out context for producing your flip books. There are controls on the rop to customize the quality. Another thing you can try with heavy geometry is to poly-reduce it or quad remesh it to a produce a lower primitive count. This reduction can help the view port. Also move your mouse over the 3D viewport and press the D-KEY. There are quality controls for the viewport under several tabs.

Maybe you could approach it as a rocket launch without flame or a helicopter downdraft expansion. There are a few setups on this site. Check my signature link.

Check out Mikael Pettersen's solution to this. He specifically did a tutorial on how to fix this issue. The HIP file is here: