VAco

Thank you for your suggestion. I have tried to implement it, I was somewhat successful. I made the object collide with particles and I spawned more particles over time from the surface. Then the particles would eat way the geometry, in a controlled way. Thing I noticed if I use a more complicated geometry some part start to float mid air since it is a static vdb volume (kinda fixed the issue with a vdb smooth operation). And it is quite sensitive, if I use too many particles it will decay way too quickly and it will be very turbulent or if I use not enough particles the geometry will take for ever to melt and then the flip particles would not preserve their volume on collision to the ground, because there are not enough of them (maybe higher res is needed ?). Nevertheless, a very interesting approach. Probably need more tests and playing around. I am quite certain it could work. Currently I am leaning a bit more towards the viscosity approach. But shall continue doing tests and see what happens. P.S. I don't have the flipbooks with me, otherwise I would post the tests.

Thanks for replying I shall try your approach. The biggest issue I am having is maintaining the frozen shape as ice would. I will try going higher res as well, which might help. Thanks. Yeah my scale was wrong. Fixed it now. Hopefully it will help with the look of the melting. I was planning on using a glass shader with some fog or some geometry that would scale down based on some attribute. Don't know about the cracking, I would just probably add a texture or some noise to replicate the scratches. Need to get the initial melting stuff looking good first Hopefully it won't take too long.

Hi, I have a project where I want to create a realistic ice melting effect. I am quite new to FLIP fluids, however I read a lot and watched some masterclasses about how the solver works in Houdini. But I still struggle at a lot of areas. Reference for the effect: What I have done currently is played around with the viscosity. Basically I took my geometry and created points out of it, then I an SDF volume from the same geometry and passed attributes the values onto points. So, the inner most points would have the lowest value and going to the surface it would reach 0. I fitted those values from a range like 1,000,000 to 0 and then using a geometry vop in the dop context i just subtract some viscosity from the points at each time step. Here are my low resolution tests: Particles: Meshed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IokJPFoNi5w&feature=youtu.be I got a somewhat decent result, however it looks more like ice cream melting than ice. It feels like the melting is not solid enough. The particles are not holding the shape as ice would. That's how far I got for now. I have a few more ideas, though (haven't tried it yet): 1) Instead of using viscosity I was thinking to start with all the points disabled (not solving) and then gradually activate them. 2) I wanted to try out using pressure, like in this example (they are using realflow): http://https://vimeo.com/13599797 but have no idea how to manipulate the pressure field: I was hoping maybe somebody with more experience would put me on a better track and maybe have more ideas or suggestions on what would be the best way to achieve this result. Also, maybe you have some suggestions on the shading part? I have some ideas, but I always tend to take the most complicated approaches I am using H15. Thank you in advance

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried to do it like that, i see a hierachy in maya ( e.g. leaves (group) -> stem (group) -> flower(group) and this group contains many elements, but other groups don't have any elements apart from holding the groups ). But the issue is that i get an error "cd is not vector valued" when i try to select any of the objects in maya's outliner and i see no geometry or anything in the viewport. I tried using "Cd" parameter in the vertex attributes, but that did not help. Do not know what to do :/

Hi, I have a question regarding using alembic format to export an animated l-system to maya. I was able to succesfully export my l-system (which is a flower) to maya, however i was wondering how would i perserve groups from houdini. Since when i export it to maya the l-system has no materials and is exported out as a single mesh AND applying materials to the leaves, stem, blossom would be very tedious face by face. What is the best way to approach this ? I have a deadline coming up very soon and ANY help would be really, kindly greatly appreciated !!! Kind Regards, Vaco