kleer001

No resizing the bounding box?

Can you be more specific? What have you already tried?

I've been using Houdini for over 20 years. You? What I mean is, have you spent long enough working in Houdini to get used to it? These are just my opinions. 01. If it can be easily changed with a line of code in the 123.py then it doesn't need to be hard coded in the gui. 02. You say project a few times. That's not the terminology. It's a hip file, or document. The project is part of the hierarchy that contains a directory for hip files along with other directories. But yes, a "*" next to the file name saying it hasn't been saved after the latest change would be great. You should submit an RFE for that. I bet other people have. 03. Preview of what? A view of the network? Which network? The last render? Which render? Where would the preview go? 04. Nah. Why? Cross platform drag and drop is sketchy. If you can do it with a script then you already have it. Importing with a file SOP is reliable. 05. It's not annoying to open another Houdini. I do it all the time. These aren't web browser tabs. If you want to work across a bunch of hips consider putting them in the same hip file or building digital assets. 06. The curve SOP? The draw curve shelf tool? What's missing? You can absolutely select multiple points. 07. Yes, the Font SOP kind sucks, but it's bare bones and works. Houdini is not a text editor or a vector design tool. If you need something fancier then do it in Photoshop, Gimp, illustrator, or Inkscape then import it as an eps or ai or exr or png or whatever. 08. Yea, the gui customization could use a tool for tweaking it, but I'd put that way on the bottom of the list. Houdini Dark/Light/Pro is kinda lame. But it works well enough for me and keeps too many people from sliding down the endless rabbit hole of pointless gui customization. And sure, the gradients are a little funky, but whatever.

trying to load up all the fbx files crashes my setup :/ I did notice you had ease in/out curves in your blend shapes. Are those messing up what you're expecting to see? Maybe linear? Maybe look into doing this in DOPs with crowds?

What do you mean by sequential? Can you be more specific? Please post a hip file.

points from Volume VOP ?

Yup, that's your problem. I've run into it before. I'm coincidentally fixing it at work too. It's a pain in the arse. Try going without the volume part of the render, if you can't change the sim. There's many places to try to fix it and prevent those render busting bubbles.

Just stick the branches into the trunk and other branches. You most likely don't need it to be water tight single perfectly modeled object like it might come out of ZBrush. Don't fall into a science-experiment mentality, it's an endless rabbit hole. Just get the pixels out

From what I understand you want the fluid to reconnect into a coherent stream after colliding with the bottle. This is actually counter to the behavior of the viscosity. Viscosity is basically the fluid trying to move the same as its neighbor. The higher the viscosity the less each point in the sim wants to spread out. And you want some spread. And unless you put in some additional forces to make it flow around the bottle it's never going to happen. Also it looks like your collision object of the wall and floor could use some additional definition. Try upping the divisions to 120 or so until the blue collision preview geo matches more closely to your poly geo. Here are some things to help make it look like you want: (mix and match at will) 1) Put the bottle in a little divot, in a little downward bump for the fluid to fill up as it goes around. A little smooth cup under the bottle with a wide downward slope. Maybe an extra radius around on each side and as deep as twice to four times your particle separation. 2) Put the whole shelf on a downward angle going down to the back where the wall is. Just one degree or less. Make sure you have enough definition in your collision object. 3) Make an advection field around your bottle. This is probably one of the trickier solutions and might look odd and require a bit of fussyness. It's more of an advanced trick. 4) Radically reduce your viscosity. You can thicken up the fluid later when you're surfacing or turn down gravity if it's flowing too fast.

Three weeks in and you're already in the deep end. This is a non trivial problem you're trying to solve. I've seen solutions come out of VFX studios, but they had multiple expert users (and math geniuses) working on it for months. What are your parameters for "proper branching topology" ? What are you trying to get that you don't already have? Certain kinds of UVs? What are you going to be doing with this geo? Projecting a texture? Baking on a 3D texture? Also your example file is based on some geo you didn't include. Please use Tommy, everyone has that geo.

I don't quite understand your strategy or your problem. Please post a hip file.

I had a bit of time to get your setup to work. Real quick, trim off one of the lines to your merge1 from the pyrosolver, and turn off the dopimport1 in your emitter_source. Also do your preliminary work with a much more coarse grid, 0.06 or more, 0.1 or so until you get all the relationships and behavior you expect. You probably just want to turn off your resize_container>Max Bounds>Clamp To Maximum then your resize will keep going. (Also you need to check on the effect from multiple angles. Then the reason would be more clear. ) You also probably want to increase your Dissipation. Thinking about stuck particles I'd use the Alpha attribute to fade them out based on velocity. What effect are you aiming for?

Why do you want to do this? What do you think you will achieve?

Play with converting a vector field to polygons. Start with straight up normalized -1,-1,-1 to 1,1,1 noise and go from there.

My intuition tells me there's a problem with the geometry, but that's difficult to diagnose. I think your water might be creating holes randomly, the top and the bottom of the water meeting and making bubbles which confuses the volume renderer, it doesn't know what's inside or outside. A fix? Deeper water. Or create your volume manually, but that leads to rough rasterized edges. How to test? Make a much smaller demo scene with similar settings and relationships between the parts.