Sierra62

My apologies, it should be 0.001. My current studio uses decimeter scale in maya, so that through me off.

All of the companies I have worked at set it so that Maya is in cm scale, then when we work in Houdini we scale the assets down by 0.1 to be at meter scale, then we scale them back up to Maya scale for either exporting or rendering.

This is a problem that seems to occur with physically accurate shaders. Once there is a gap between the two objects it assumes it full of air and you end up with that milky look. The quickest way I have found to get around it is by extending your mesh down into the ground. You can do this by moving the points of your mesh down that have a negative Y Normal. Or you can just raise up your beach geometry slightly.

There are a few ways to go about doing this. The way I typically do it is to have 2 different sources. The first source is the one I use to emit the density, I typically use less points and have a shorter lifespan on them. The second source I use just for velocity. For the velocity I use quite a few points and make sure that they are creating the shape I am looking for. By having seperate sources for emission and velocity you will get the pulling look that you find in tornados. When you bring them into the dopnet, you will need 2 source volumes. For your source smoke, set the Volume Operation "velocity" to none. With your source velocity set the volume operation "velocity" to Blended Average. I hope this helps, let me know if you still have questions.

I would try using the match function.

The enabling Geometry Velocity blur is only relevant for rendering. The issue here has more to do with the fluid stamping particles. Personally I have had inconsistent results with using the fluid source motion blur on particles. I suspect it has to do with the changing point count and not having control over what attribute to use, such as id. The motion blur works much better on actual geometry. There are some issues that are worth noting when using the fluid source motion blur, the main issue is that it doesn't blur the velocity channel as well. So you can end up with a nice looking density source, but the velocity looks the same as density without motion blur. Typically when I am doing something fast moving and I won't use the motion blur on the fluid source, I prefer to use a trail with the "preserve original" result. This gives me more control over the trail look, and I don't have to deal with lack of velocity blur when I use the fluid source node.

That looks really good. I am curious to hear more about the process, and in particular some of the major hurdles you came across. I am assuming that you are going to keep working on this idea, so what are planning on doing next?

That is very impressive. Thanks for sharing.

For creating digital assets there are 2 formats. HDA which is the current format for digital assets since H14, and OTL which was the default before HDA.

From what I understand, node instancing is being developed and may be available in an upcoming release. However exporting your subnet as a digital asset should work for a lot cases where you may want to instance node trees.

You can post topics that might be interesting to those on the forums in the lounge/general chat. So you are more than welcome to share some announcements that aren't Houdini specific. The rest of the forum is Houdini specific however.

By default Houdini's viewport resolution for volumes is fairly low. If you go into your Display Options under the texture tab, There is a variable for 3D textures, try increasing the "Limit Resolution" to 256 or 512. It should give you a much more accurate representation of your volumes. I would however be careful about turning it off or setting it too high since it can eat up a lot of ram and really slow the system down.

Thanks Fuat, that does help with visualizing sop level geometry.

I submitted an RFE to sidefx about this. For those that are interested the RFE is (82225).

For a while I have been having a hard time visualizing the geometry from other sop nodes when I am inside of a dopnet inside a node. The "Show all options" for viewing geometry only works if the dopnet is at the sop level. This also seems to be a similar issue if you want to visualize lighting on volumes.