kleer001

without more information no one can help you please post a simplified version of your scene so someone can help you

Cutting up the task into multiple shots will help you a lot. That way you don't need to have any continuity between actions. I don't suspect that you'll need to use much or any scripting or vex.

Have you tried playing with a v@rest position attribute? Set it for your base geo before you flatten it. Add another one, say v@rest2 to the 2D version. Set the position back to their initial rest, then move the points the difference between the rest and rest2. That will give you absolute transforms. But that won't be useful, say, on a sphere. A better bet might be to duplicate your initial flat geo then point deform your modified geo based on the transformation of your initial flat back to the initial 3D. That's probably your best bet.

Did you turn off "ignore mass" on your POP force node ? Please provide a simple version of your problem in a hip file for more detailed help.

The Transparency texture isn't working for you?

Could you use an Add SOP and build the line from 0-$N ?

I think that'd be a shader thing with a switch and bunch of hand tuned Material SOPs. And then have the same switch controlling which of several pyro solver gets output. That's what I'd do if it were one setup per burning material/solver. Several burning materials in one solver? I'd have switches pumping in different emission volumes into the solver too. Not a trivial exercise, sounds like fun!

Visually, what are you trying to accomplish? If we generated a Cd field from a scalar field (heat, temp, burn, etc) I'm sure it'd be monochrome.

Hi Dave! I just did some colored smoke, like last week. Sadly, it was a dumb straightforward solution. I'm sure there must be some clever way to extract the burn or heat fields, noise them up and then emit Cd from them. First I created my fire sim. Got it the way I liked. Then used the same source geo with some Cd noise and emitted colored smoke from that in another separate sim. Then I used the velocity field from the first sim. I figured that gave me the most control. I did use an offset noise from the fuel/burn/temperature emission in the original sim because otherwise the colors would be pretty bland as they would exactly correspond to the burning. The key in comp was to use the fire_mask from the original fire sim as the Cd will continue off far longer into space and not look like fire at all. However, I did find a sneaky little gotcha that chewed up a few hours of frustration. Do not, under any circumstances, add Cd to the Gas Resize Fluid Dynamic DOP in the Extra Resize Fields or the Reference Field. Why? From what I understand the internal blurring in the Cd field means that if it can it will greedily expand and take up more and more volume every step with minimal or no actual color value in it. You'll end up with a monster box. And not in a good way.

From what I understand the "small scale" is the size of the resolution. So, I guess, try to keep it above 0.01 and scale your scene around that. As for speed all you need to do is follow your reference. Eye-ball it.

UV Quickshade SOP ?

In Zbrush??? I think polygons will be easier to manipulate than curves.

> L-System node hasn't changed You are correct. AFAIK it's never changed. Why? Because it's not useful. In my 21 years of experience with Houdini I've only seen it used in production once. That was on the original Live Action Grinch who Store XMas with Jim Carry. Where was it used? To make the gigantic pine tree in the Whoville square. Those crazy guys at DD actually printed out some of the FF+F+FF+fFF instruction nonsense, but stopped and killed the job when they realized it would take hundreds of pages to print it out. And since then there's been a renaissance of tree building techniques and companies that will sell you pre-built trees for almost any popular species. Look, I love L-systems. They're a fun idea and a good introduction to fractals. But IMHO they're useless. Oh, no, wait, I think I remember they were used in Frozen maybe? Still, you can do way more with particles and a SOP Solver.

If all else fails you can use one of the several remote workstation setups like Atheria.

With anything like this it's best to work backwards. Have the thing arranged they way you want all together, by hand. Then disassemble it, again by hand, into the arrangement you want. Then, use dynamics to coordinate the positions of the in-progress pieces. You'll probably need to work in groups and layers of interactions, that is, not all at once. This is going to give you the fastest and most predictable results.