Leaderboard

Hey guys I interviewed Manuel Tausch (FX TD/co founder of Stormborn Studios) for FX World. The interview went live today. Here's the link! http://fxworld.tv/interview-with-manuel-tausch-pt-1/

Hi everyone, Herer's a little personal project I did over the last year. No keyframes where used for the animation. Each movement is generated through physical simulation or procedural noise. The Bananas and Pears are done in H16.5 using CHOPs controlled Bones and then fed into a FEM simulation. All the other fruits are done using H17 and Vellum. ÖBST: "How would fruits move if they could?" Hope you like it.

Unwrap the mesh (right) before deformation (left): Assign zigzag UVs to the curve (right) and transfer positions from the mesh based on both UVs (left): spiral_mesh.hipnc

Hi everyone! The past week I worked on a personal project for learn something about hairs - vellum. It's my first project ever with hairs so I guess is nothing special but several people asked to see the hip file so here it is. Final result: Hip file (I had to recreate it but it should be pretty much the same): groom_clumping_03.hipnc

Here's an idea : ) fyrework_shapes_johnkunz.v1.hipnc

Hey all, here's a shot I've been working on! Speed Tree, Houdini and Redshift. Have a good one

DM 1.5 first screenshot: https://i.postimg.cc/rcy3KY3v/dm1-5-screen.png

Hey Howard! Sorry about that! Here is the scene, I polyreduced a bit one of the frames of the sim to have a less heavy file to share! By the way, that mesh still has a freeSurface attribute; So you can use that gradient for nice shading effects. I forgot to say that this scene uses Redshift. v2.6.32; H17.459. Cheers! Alejandro FLIP_crown_v005_share.hip

Here is another test using a last iteration of my tools to do small scale stuff. This time, now is possible to art direct how much do you want to break a sheet into drops and tendrils, and there are some Micro Ripples on the sheets that are relative to the fluid speed and curvature at some portions of the main fluid body! oil_details_shading_cam01_v001.mp4 Thank you! Alejandro

sup bb I'm not sure how you could do this without a solver, since it's accumulating rotation over time based on the speed and direction of motion each frame. I could be all kinds of wrong, though. Here's my method... I'm using the distance traveled and a vector orthogonal to the direction of travel to build an angle/axis quaternion, and adding (qmultiplying) that quaternion to the existing orient for each timestep. It's not perfect but it seems to work pretty well. Since it's basing the rotation angle on cross(dir, up), it might freak out if the ball rolls straight down. Curious if any smart people have a better answer for that. AutoRoll01_toadstorm.hip

I thought this could interest other Houdini artists too: For a long time I was checking out all kinds of realtime 3D tools and never found one that wasn't somehow clunky or weird or ugly... Last week I discovered Cables.gl and spend quite some time with it over the weekend - and I'm deeply impressed. Not only is is a very well laid out application, it also runs in your browser! https://cables.gl There are also a lot of good tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7IRYQBFbt1KX4YmhBuIbhA/videos It needs some brain-reorganisation since it has a bit of a different logic and flow from Houdini, following the logic of OpenGL, but at least TAB opens the node list :-) Cheers, Tom

For anyone that is interested: here is a tutorial on the best method I found to get nice motion. I figured I would post this since I still get messaged about this thread. https://youtu.be/DLSmz9HOKlE

Here is a breakdown of how I made this bear made out of duplo blocks: The video isn't super comprehensive, I mainly cover setting up the constraints in SOPs, though I briefly touch on some other parts too. But the hip file is available to pick apart! Thanks! duplo_bear.zip

Hi my name is Nicolas Heluani, I am a Motion/VFX artist based in Iceland. For the past few years I been working mainly in Motion Graphics for local TV productions. But I am trying to move into more challenging VFX tasks, a subject I always loved. I am a highly creative abstract thinker with an ease in math and VEX. I like to constantly challenge myself into learning how things work and then do it myself. I am attaching here my demo-reel, I hope you like it. For more info please send me a PM at nicolasheluani@gmail.com If you have read so far, thank you, and at least I hope you enjoyed my reel. I plan to update my Vimeo feed soon with some work I am currently doing, like I said I am constantly challenging myself Nico.

Hey there! Trying to be more active. Here's a WIP of a project I did for Peter Claes's Houdini class. Such a cool technique to play around with. Struggled a ton, and have lot of extra RnD elements that got gutted haha. But I learned a lot. Have to Re-Render, have some slime / rivulets for the eggs in the next render, which I have been struggling with. Initially was flip but switched to something simpler and less heavy.. Had issues transferring V for motion blur due to changing pt numbers but I'm sure someone probably could figure it out! Wanted to add one of the eggs exploding. but stretched thin on time. Will do another rnd for it. Will re-render without motion blur I think. Someone had idea of adding veins, like a neural network that activate and reveal. but I failed at that for texturing lol. I think I could brute force it with geometry to replicate it but that just seems wrong. Also I keep running into Lights inside Volumes on my projects.. makes clearing up noise pretty miserable! Will return to this project after school and expand on it.

Indeed! quite a production, yes it will be a mix of mapping, leds and some lights that create shapes (not sure how to explain but they are like arrays that make a lot of long lasers wich create some sort of hologram) Here are some tests from today, first ones are super crapy but I want to give some options to the client with chops (still trying to figure out how to chop your setup ), I also tried some grains on the particles, flip modules, and optical flow (client asked me if we can drive the animations with a texture from AE, maybe they will be making stuff ritm with sound keys or something) AG_011_Drops_RD_02_Low.mp4 Sorry for the poor quality Cheers!

Tried to make a version without a solver. rain_01.hiplc

please take a look at the attached file. i've slightly modified the old example and now it should work without problems. hth, petz human1.hiplc

Was playing around with draping loose robes on characters. Instead of stitching panels I just made a very low poly model of robe-like shape around my high-res models, converted them to Vellum cloth and run a simulation. Quite pleased with the results.

here is slightly modified code to Konstantin's answer to account for pivots and real bounds in case your packed pieces are already transformed float space = chf('space'); vector offset = 0.0; for(int i = 0; i < npoints(0); i++){ float bounds[] = primintrinsic(0, 'bounds', i); vector pivot = set(bounds[0], 0, 0); setpointattrib(0, 'P', i, offset-pivot, 'add'); float width = bounds[1] - bounds[0]; offset.x += width + space; }

as I said, stylesheets or vex are both good methods. vex allows very straightforward assignments by matching @path names. stylesheets allows assigning materials to packed geometry and more complicated assignment patterns. with simple vex assignment, you'd go like this (in primitive wrangle SOP): if(match('*brick*', s@path)) s@shop_materialpath = '/mat/brickMaterial'; if(match('*wood*', s@path)) s@shop_materialpath = '/mat/woodMaterial'; if(match('*metal*', s@path) || match('*METAL*', s@path)) s@shop_materialpath = '/mat/metalMaterial'; ... this expects a meaningful naming convention, obviously. if you have a good naming, you can specify just a few patterns to batch assign materials to many objects at once. all in single wrangle node. this is also the fastest way to assign many materials I guess (in terms of processing). this method also works well with attributeStringEdit SOP - if you have slightly messy naming of alembic paths, you can fix/unify them first with this SOP and then batch assign materials with vex as shown above.

1) return => function int sum(int x, int y) { return x+y; } takes 2 integers and returns their sum .. so yeah it gives you back something 2) yes 3) surface node is any SOP. those "cells/windows" are parameters. They can have 1 or more channels (= "cells" per row) 4) probably Dimension. Don't care, I'm lazy and use 0, 1, 2 5) centroid() is a function, $CEX, etc are global variables. Difference is centroid() can grab centroid of any SOP whereas $CEX always returns the centroid of the SOP you use it on 6) yes

This is my first post in a long time here, I've shared this teaser with some of you on FB, Youtube, vimeo and Linkedin today. So what is it? A path for us to use cloud providers directly for our craft at the lowest possible price. I have been building modules to spin up infrastructure in AWS with a language called Terraform (also open source, and can talk to other providers). My ongoing work for this I've decided to open source under the project name openFirehawk. This work I've been doing over the last 9 months can benefit Houdini artists and I'm proud to start talking about it, before I launch on Patreon in a week from now for your support on this open source project. I realised through my deep dive into all things cloud to solve my own CG life problems in Houdini, that actually this should just be "The Way"... Cloud rendering till now hurt my wallet too much, and I was yet to see it provide the power of a full blown pipeline, which I sorely wanted. So I thought, "Wouldn't it be insane if we could just build our own modular open source infrastructure for VFX and directly pay the big services to use their machines at the lowest possible price?" Also, I thought it would be cool to be able to say "Want a copy of my vfx infrastructure?" So I've created openFirehawk to do that. Its purpose is to provide access to the cloud providers, at the base price of that resource, and give you full control with a killer combo - teradici software for remote workstation graphics if you want that (paid per minute), ssh access to nodes over vpn, render management with whatever render manager we want (I started to implement deadline, which is free on AWS by way of being credited to your account), and any storage solution we choose (currently softnas on demand consumption is the cheapest, best and easiest I've found). Open source is a path to making the cloud as cheap as possible for our craft, and openFirehawk proves it is possible with this demo simulation I ran in AWS above. The rendered effects here are just the beginning of what openFirehawk can do with CG rendering & virtual workstations for artists. The animation was simulated and rendered in Houdini on AWS instances for $1.20. I paid $0.01 per core hour - many times cheaper than the alternatives available to me. 100 cores for $1/hr sounds nice... Now to be clear - for us, we still need floating engine licences to use this. I can't propogate code that would violate the EULA and plonk Indie in the cloud yet... But just 1 engine licence can do a lot with 96+ VCPUs, probably more compute than most of us could afford in a single box. I would hope that in time, more doors open up for us as Side FX have already helped cloud users in response to some discussion I had with them about LAL Licensing in this video I did in the jungle a while back and I hope things continue down this path. openFirehawk is currently in alpha, and its use has manual steps on the client side that I plan to eliminate. It is an on going project, and I want it to be a good modular and extendable foundation for other code contributors in our industry. So, would you like a copy of my 3D rendering cloud infrastructure to produce CG like this? I will have a need for your support to take it far - into something that you can use more easily, and a tool that continues to improve. Any support you want to provide by sharing my posts like this, talking about the work, and contributing through Patreon when it launches 19th February will help take openFirehawk to become something that everyone in CG can benefit alot from. I'm stoked to share this work with the community, and I hope to see where it goes, Big love! Andrew Graham

Well for the scatter node, the density scale is measured per m^2, so if you use a measure SOP to measure the area (it will be set to perimeter by default) you can then use an attribute promote SOP to promote the area from primitive to detail, using the "sum" method. you now should have the total surface area as a detail attribute. Then you can fetch that attribute, and divide it by the size of your bark pieces, times some kind of smudge factor and put that as the density in you scatter node. That should give you a reasonable filling in

Many of the gotchas, I experienced when I first started using Redshift have been ironed out with the continued development of the plug-in. Mainly an object that does not have the ObjParms applied to it can cause some problems. If they are not present, attributes will not be automatically forwarded to the material section. This can happen if you open old files and try to adapt them to Redshift. However, newly created objects do have ObjParms added by default, so just double check that if things seem like they are not working correctly. Another gotcha that I still run into is not experiencing glow from material emission on surrounding objects. This is because GI is turned off by default. You need to turn on one of the methods (typically Brute Force) to get some kind of emission bounce. But this is often the case with other render systems as well. Balancing density and temperature values in the volume shader can take some time too. I have adopted the workflow where I don't push density at all in the guides, and this helps get a better 1:1 match from viewport to render. Push your density values at the attribute or scale level, instead of guides. There is the 16 bounce limit on reflections as well. If you need more than that, you have to leverage the sprite cutout node instead of just relying on the standard material. Meshlights don't inherit v@Cd from points so you have to bake maps for multi-colored meshlights, but single colored meshlights work fine.

The "Leave playbar at last frame" toggle in the Flipbook options will avoid jumping to the frame you were on before you started the flipbook (Houdini 16.5+).

We have a slate of exciting shows lined up for 2019, and the team in Singapore is looking to hire Senior FXTDs! Apply here: https://app.jobvite.com/j?cj=o3kk9fwA&s=https://forums.odforce.net/

You could do it with a sopsolver and the attributes mass and gluetoanimation. unpinOverTime.hip

This operator allows you to call a collection of nodes on any data or simply no data (generators). It gives you full control over how the lambda function should be run.

There are so many nice example files on this website that I am often searching for. I wanted to use this page as a link page to other posts that I find useful, hopefully you will too. Displaced UV Mapped Tubes Particles Break Fracture Glue Bonds Render Colorized Smoke With OpenGL Rop Moon DEM Data Creates Model Python Script Make A Belly Bounce Helicopter Dust Effect Conform Design To Surface Benjamin Button Intro Sequence UV Style Mapping UV Box and Multiple Projection Styles Ping Pong Frame Expression Instance vs. Copy (Instance Is Faster) Particle Bug Swarm Over Vertical and Horizontal Geometry Rolling Cube Rounded Plexus Style Effect Pyro Smoke UpRes Smoke Trails From Debris Align Object Along Path Fading Trail From Moving Point Swiss Cheese VDB To Polygons Get Rid Of Mushroom Shape In Pyro Sim A Tornado Ball Of Yarn Particles Erode Surface Unroll Paper Burrow Under Brick Road Non Overlapping Copies Build Wall Brick-By-Brick FLIP Fluid Thin Sheets Smoke Colored Like Image Volumetric Spotlight Moving Geometry Using VEX Matt's Galaxy Diego's Vortex Cloud Loopable Flag In Wind Eetu's Lab <--Must See! Wolverine's Claws (Fracture By Impact) Houdini To Clarisse OBJ Exporter Skrinkwrap One Mesh Over Another Differential Growth Over Surface [PYTHON]Post Process OBJ Re-Write Upon Export Rolling Clouds Ramen Noodles Basic Fracture Extrude Match Primitive Number To Point Number Grains Activate In Chunks Fracture Wooden Planks Merge Two Geometry Via Modulus Fill Font With Fluid DNA Over Model Surface VDB Morph From One Shape To Another Bend Font Along Curve Ripple Obstacle Across 3D Surface Arnold Style Light Blocker Sphere Dripping Water (cool) Exploded View Via Name Attribute VEX Get Obj Matrix Parts eetu's inflate cloth Ice Grows Over Fire Flying Bird As Particles DEM Image To Modeled Terrain Pyro Temperature Ignition Extrude Like Blender's Bevel Profile Particles Flock To And Around Obstacles BVH Carnegie Mellon Mocap Tweaker (python script) Rolling FLIP Cube Crowd Agents Follow Paths Keep Particles On Deforming Surface Particle Beam Effect Bendy Mograph Text Font Flay Technique Curly Abstract Geometry Melt Based Upon Temperature Large Ship FLIP Wake (geo driven velocity pumps) Create Holes In Geo At Point Locations Cloth Blown Apart By Wind Cloth Based Paper Confetti Denim Stitching For Fonts Model A Raspberry Crumple Piece Of Paper Instanced Forest Floor Scene FLIP pushes FEM Object Animated Crack Colorize Maya nParticles inside an Alembic Path Grows Inside Shape Steam Train Smoke From Chimney Using Buoyancy Field On RBDs In FLIP Fluid Fracture Along A Path COP Based Comet Trail eetu's Raidal FLIP Pump Drip Down Sides A Simple Tornado Point Cloud Dual Colored Smoke Grenades Particles Generate Pyro Fuel Stick RBDs To Transforming Object Convert Noise To Lines Cloth Weighs Down Wire (with snap back) Create Up Vector For Twisting Curve (i.e. loop-d-loop) VDB Gowth Effect Space Colonization Zombie L-System Vine Growth Over Trunk FLIP Fluid Erosion Of GEO Surface Vein Growth And Space Colonization Force Only Affects Particle Inside Masked Area Water Ball External Velocity Field Changes POP particle direction Bullet-Help Small Pieces Come To A Stop Lightning Around Object Effect Lightning Lies Upon Surface Of Object Fracture Reveals Object Inside Nike Triangle Shoe Effect Smoke Upres Example Julien's 2011 Volcano Rolling Pyroclastic FLIP Fluid Shape Morph (with overshoot) Object Moves Through Snow Or Mud Scene As Python Code Ramp Scale Over Time Tiggered By Effector Lattice Deforms Volume Continuous Geometric Trail Gas Enforce Boundary Mantra 2D And 3D Velocity Pass Monte Carlo Scatter Fill A Shape Crowd Seek Goal Then Stop A Bunch Of Worms Potential Field Lines Around Postive and Negative Charges Earthquake Wall Fracture Instance Animated Geometry (multiple techniques) Flip Fluid Attracted To Geometry Shape Wrap Geo Like Wrap3 Polywire or Curve Taper Number Of Points From Second Input (VEX) Bullet Custom Deformable Metal Constraint Torn Paper Edge Deflate Cube Rotate, Orient and Alignment Examples 3D Lines From 2D Image (designy) Make Curves In VEX Avalanche Smoke Effect Instant Meshes (Auto-Retopo) Duplicate Objects With VEX Polywire Lightning VEX Rotate Instances Along Curved Geometry Dual Wind RBD Leaf Blowing Automatic UV Cubic Projection (works on most shapes) RBD Scatter Over Deforming Person Mesh FLIP Through Outer Barrier To Inner Collider (collision weights) [REDSHIFT] Ground Cover Instancing Setup [REDSHIFT] Volumetric Image Based Spotlight [REDSHIFT] VEX/VOP Noise Attribute Planet [REDSHIFT] Blood Cell Blood Vessel Blood Stream [REDSHIFT] Light Volume By Material Emission Only [REDSHIFT] Python Script Images As Planes (works for Mantra Too!) [REDSHIFT] MTL To Redshift Material [REDSHIFT] Access CHOPs In Volume Material [REDSHIFT] Mesh Light Inherits Color [REDSHIFT] Color Smoke [REDSHIFT] FBX Import Helper [REDSHIFT] Terrain Instancer Height Field By Feature Dragon Smashes Complex Fractured House (wood, bricks, plaster) Controlling Animated Instances Road Through Height Field Based Terrain Tire Tread Creator For Wheels Make A Cloth Card/Sheet Follow A NULL Eye Veins Material Matt Explains Orientation Along A Curve Mesh Based Maelstrom Vortex Spiral Emit Multiple FEM Objects Over Time Pushing FEM With Pyro Spiral Motion For Wrangle Emit Dynamic Strands Pop Grains Slope, Peak and Flat Groups For Terrains Install Carnegie Mellon University BVH Mocap Into MocapBiped1 Ramp Based Taper Line Fast Velocity Smoke Emitter Flip Fill Cup Ice Cubes Float [PYTHON]Export Houdini Particles To Blender .bphys Cache Format Collision Deform Without Solver or Simulation Mograph Lines Around Geometry Waffle Cornetto Ice Cream Cone Ice Cream Cone Top Unroll Road Or Carpet Burning Fuse Ignites Fuel or Painted Fuel Ignition Painted Fuel Combustion Small Dent Impact Deformation Particle Impact Erosion or Denting Of A Surface Helicopter Landing Smoke And Particles Radial Fracture Pieces Explode Outwards Along Normal Tangent Based Rocket Launch Rolling Smoke Field Tear/Rip FLIP (H12 still works in H16) Rain Flows Over Surface Rains Water Drip Surface Splash Smoke Solver Tips & Tricks Folding Smoke Sim VEX Generated Curve For Curling Hair Copy and Align One Shape Or Object To The Primitives Of Another Object (cool setup) A Better Pop Follow Curve Setup FEM Sea Cucumber Moves Through Barrier Fracture Cloth Smoke Confinement Setup Merge multiple .OBJ directly Into A Python Node Blood In Water Smoke Dissipates When Near Collision Object Whirlpool Mesh Surface Whirlpool Velocity Motion For FLIP Simple Bacteria Single Point Falling Dust Stream Flames Flow Outside Windows Gas Blend Density Example Localized Pyro Drag (smoke comes to a stop) Granular Sheet Ripping Post Process An Export (Post Write ROP Event) Corridor Ice Spread or Growth Set Velocity On Pieces When Glue Bonds Break Water Drops Along Surface Condensation Bottle Grains Snow or Wet Sand Starter Scene A Nice Little Dissolver Turn An Image Into Smoke Fading Ripples Grid Example Stranger Things Wall Effect Face Through Rubber Wall [PYTHON]Create Nurbs Hull Shelf Tool [PYTHON] Ramp Parameter Select Outside Points Of Mesh, Honor Interior Holes Sparks Along Fuse With Smoke Umbrella Rig Melt FLIP UVs Tire Burn Out Smoke Sim Flip or Pyro Voxel Estimate Expression Motorcycle or Dirt Bike Kicks Up Sand Particles Push Points Out Of A Volume [PYTHON]Cellular Automata Cave Generator Punch Dent Impact Ripple Wrinkle VEX Rotate Packed Primitive Via Intrinsic Kohuei Nakama's Effect FLIP Fluid Inside Moving Container Particles Avoid Metaball Forces FLIP Divergence Setup FLIP Transfer Color Through Simulation To Surface Morph Between Two Static Shapes As Pyro Emits Constraint Based Car Suspension Pyro Smoke Gas Disturbs Velocity Wire Solver Random Size Self Colliding Cables Fast Cheap Simple Collision Deform CHOP Based Wobble For Animated Character Slow Motion FLIP Whaitewater Avoid Stepping In Fast Pyro Emission FLIP Fluid Fills Object Epic Share Of Softbody/Grain Setups (Must see!) Balloon, Pizza, Sail, Upres Shirt, Paint Brush Create Pop Grain Geometry On-The-Fly In A DOPs Solver Varying Length Trails VEX Based Geometry Transform Determine Volume Minimum and Maximum Values Grain Upres Example Animated pintoanimation For Cloth Sims Batch Render Folder Of OBJ files Vellum Weaving Cloth Fibers Knitting Kaleidoscopic Geometry UV Image Map To Points Or Hair Color Particles Like Trapcode Particular Flat Tank Boat Track With Whitewater Orthographic Angle Font Shadow Select Every Other Primitive or Face? Printer Spits Out Roll Of Paper Unroll Paper, Map, Plans, Scroll Simple Vellum L-System Plant Use Google To Discover Attached HIP Files Useful Websites: Tokeru Houdini Houdini Vex Houdini Python FX Thinking iHoudini Qiita Ryoji Video Tutorials: Peter Quint Rohan Dalvi Ben Watts Design Yancy Lindquist Contained Liquids Moving Fem Thing Dent By Rigid Bodies Animating Font Profiles Guillaume Fradin's Mocap Crowd Series(no longer available) Swirly Trails Over Surface http://forums.odforce.net/topic/24861-atoms-video-tutorials/ http://forums.odforce.net/topic/17105-short-and-sweet-op-centric-lessons/page-5#entry127846 Entagma SideFX Go Procedural

I can't take credit for it, but it needed to be shared. This made me cry with laughter.

restlength is a primitive attribute of the ConstraintGeometry, but by default both SOP Solver and Geometry Wrangle run on Geometry data so change SOP Solver/Data Name or Geometry Wrangle/Bindings/Geometry to Constraint Geometry and run over Primitives because you are setting stopped to 1 on your group1, but you are not setting it to 0 for all other points so when you move your group our of the way, it will simply not set 1 to any points, but there is nothing to set already stopped points to 0 so they stay stopped

nature.hipnc just to say hello and share some stuffs. /cnc_verkstad/ Tesan Srdjan

Autodesk and Adobe two evil corps )))

people would be more keen to share an example file with you if you uploaded one as well showing that you have tried to recreate this FX on your own.

Made a little piece combining some of Matt Ebb's raytracing techniques from his 2017 Siggraph talk with a somewhat straightforward quadtree setup.

a shot i recently finished for a personal project

Keep in mind that everything in your example DOPnet is a single Vellum object, not multiple objects. You can emit more points and constraints into the simulation if you like, but it's all data that's being added to a single Vellum object, "vellumobject1". There's a couple things that will make Houdini very angry when deleting geometry from a Vellum object. First, from my testing it seems that you don't want to delete individual points/prims from a Vellum patch... you want to delete the whole patch at once if you're going to take that route mid-simulation. Second, you absolutely need to delete the associated constraints as well. In DOPs, the actual Vellum mesh is "Geometry" data, but the constraints are "ConstraintGeometry". This means that you need a SOP Solver (or Geometry wrangle, depending on what you like to work with) for both of these data names to delete both the Geometry and the ConstraintGeometry so that you don't end up with constraints that no longer have anything to constrain. I'm attaching an example here... I modified the Vellum Source to change the Patch Name so that each generated sphere has a unique name (based on the frame number when they're emitted), then in the Solver SOPs I run a for/each over each patch, get the minimum P.y position, and delete entire patches at once when their minimum P.y is less than zero. vellum_culling_toadstorm.hip

Cool, now we can attack the fluidic death star! Or maybe a force field.

did some small tweaks , and here is the modified version , hope this helps ShapeFormBySmoke_test_mod.hipnc

I kinda figured it out, in case someone comes across this and is wanting an answer. If your animation loops, I have realized you need to transition it during that first loop. So what I ended up doing was using two transition graphs and using a time shift and a switch sop, I did the first transition then at a later time, switched to another transition graph and the time shift allowed me to use the first loop and I managed to get this - Transition Graph 1 (A to B), SWITCH SOP at frame "X" to Transition Graph 2(B to C) The time shift just basically shifted to time to the start of the animation loop even though we had passed it in time. This technique could be expanded to as many animations as you'd like I assume. There is probably a better way to do this but it worked for me so I am just posting this here in case someone else needs help

Better ripples, not realy any better explanation. Its basicly a combination of fitrange and modulo. rain_02.hiplc

what if the self buttons were creating DOP setups inside one SOP network instead of having a Geometry node, a DOP network for simulation and another Geometry node to import the data and save to disk. It makes much more sense to see the data flow from top to bottom in one network without having to jump to different levels for no reason. maybe it's just me... grains.hipnc

Hi roberttt! I did that specific fracture before the Houdini 16+ booleans were available, using a custom voronoi cutters technique. Basically, I used boolean-style cutter geometry to guide a voronoi fracture. 1) Scattered lots of points on the cutter geo, point-jitter them for width, and create cluster attributes on those points to create small clumps 2) Create a band of voronoi points a bit further from the cutter geometry, to define the large chunks. These points all get the same cluster value, and make sure that cluster value isn't used in the small-chunks clusters. 3) Run the fracture with clustering.... although the new H17 voronoi fracture doesn't seem to have clustering built in. So I believe you need to do the clustering post-fracture in H17, which unfortunately doesn't have an option to remove the unnecessary internal faces, so the geom can be a bit heavy with the new workflow. (Unless I'm missing something obvious!) I don't think I've used this voronoi fracture workflow at all since the H16+ booleans were released, and I've removed that technique from my CGMA destruction class. Nowadays I would handle this in one of these ways: - Running a primary boolean fracture to define the main chunks, and then running a secondary pass where I generate additional fragments on the edges of the main pieces. There are various ways to generate those secondary boolean edge cuts, and it's always a bit experimental. - Fracture everything at once into lots of small pieces, and use noise or geometry-grouping to define the larger shapes from the smaller fracture. Then once those large chunks are defined, use constraints or the name attribute or double-packing to get them to behave as individual large pieces. Hope this helps! :-)

Try this... Put down a measure SOP and set it to measure the perimeter of your curves. After that a primitive wrangle and write. #include <groom.h> adjustPrimLength(0, @primnum, @perimeter, @perimeter*@dist); groom.h is a included file containing some functions used in the grooming tools and one of the functions is... void adjustPrimLength(const int geo, prim; const float currentlength, targetlength)

Methods to Stir Up the Leading Velocity Pressure Front We need to disturb that leading velocity pressure front to start the swirls and eddies prior to the fireball. That and have a noisy interesting emitter. Interesting Emitters and Environments I don't think that a perfect sphere exploding in to a perfect vacuum with no wind or other disturbance exists, except in software. Some things to try are to pump in some wind like swirls in to the container to add some large forces to shape the sim later on as it rises. The source by default already has noise on it by design. This does help break down the effect but the Explosion and fireball presets have so much divergence that very quickly it turns in to a glowing smooth ball. But it doesn't hurt. It certainly does control the direction of the explosion. Directly Affecting the Pressure Front - Add Colliders with Particles One clever way is to surround the exploding object with colliders. Points set large enough to force the leading velocity field to wind through and cause the nice swirls. There are several clever ways to proceduralize this. The easiest way is with the Fluid Source SOP and manipulate the Edge Location and Out Feather Length and then scatter points in there then run the Collide With tool on the points. Using colliders to cut up the velocity over the first few frames can work quite well. This will try to kick the leading pressure velocity wave about and hopefully cause nice swirling and eddies as the explosion blows through the colliders. I've seen presentations where smoke dust walls flowing along the ground through invisible tube colliders just to encourage the swirling of the smoke. You can also advect points through the leading velocity field and use these as vorticles to swirl the velocity about. The one nice thing about using geometry to shape and control the look, as you increase the resolution of the sim, it has a tendency to keep it's look in tact, at least the bulk motion. As an aside, you could add the collision field to the resize container list (density and vel) to make sure the colliders are always there if it makes sense to do so. Colliders work well when you have vortex confinement enabled. You can use this but confinement has a tendency to shred the sim as it progresses. You can keyframe confinement and boost it over the first few frames to try and get some swirls and eddies to form. Pile On The Turbulence Another attempt to add a lot of character to that initial velocity front is to add heaping loads of turbulence to counter the effect of the disturbance field. You can add as many Gas Turbulence DOPs to the velocity shaping input of the Pyro Solver to do the job. Usually the built-in turbulence is set up to give you nice behaviour as the fireball progresses. Add another net new one and set it up to only affect the velocity for those first few frames. Manufacturing the turbulence in this case. In essence no different than using collision geometry except that it doesn't have the regulating effect that geometry has in controlling the look of the explosion, fireball or flames, or smoke. As with the shredding, turbulence has it's own visualization field so you can see where it is being applied. Again the problem is that you need a control field or the resize container will go to full size but if it works, great. Or use both colliders and turbulence pumped in for the first few frames and resize on the colliders. Up to you. But you could provide some initial geometry in /obj and resize on that object if you need to. Hope this helps...

1. Save multi snapping state 2. Controlling multi snapping state from HOM 3. Multi component selection 4. Getting geometry (not world) position with viewport coordinates 5. Get pre-selection highligted comp from python 6. Slide points (edges) node\tool 7. Bridge tool 8. Inserting edge loops with flow (with smooth interpolation) 9. Getting main-widget and viewport as QtGui.QWidget with HOM 10. Optionally hide invisible (backface) components from snapping 11. Soft preview in Edit SOP like in SoftTransform\SoftPreak SOP 12. Remove rotate from indirect manipulation with MMB in multi-type (move, rotate, scale) transform nodes 13. Tweak tool