kleer001

be able to read DPX image format I understand it's a mess of a format, but just being able to read them would be good enough

Without a scene to play with I can only guess. Have you tried denser geometry? Like, waaay more polygons? Are you rendering with Polygons as Subdiv ? Have you tried rendering them as VDBs?

Yup, that sounds right. Best to do a quick proof of concept first though, to double check.

That is from an insufficiently high enough resolution. Crank that sucker, maybe even to 0.01 or lower. You'll want to use friction and bounce (on the solver) too. I'm a fan of a little bit of viscosity too, like just 1. Also in your solver, the volume motion > surface tension would be good to turn on too. Turn on and play with filtering in the surfacer.

Are you overthinking it? strreplace($HIP, "light", "fx") right?

Easy fix, use a grid that's bigger than your line and then ray SOP it down with a vector, not closest.

From here: https://github.com/scottdraves/flam3 ? Nice!

What? No. That's not it at all. Re-read my post. Then read those manual pages I linked to. How would I have noticed anything? You didn't post a hip file. Also, this is all theory. I've never done this myself, but it seems possible from reading the manual.

Not from default. You need a ".sim" file. https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/dyno/cache#baking-out-sim-files When you're running really large sims it pays off to turn off the local cache in the DOP network. This makes the sim not have to keep in memory all the previous frames. This is great when you're scrubbing small sims. But bad when you're doing a great big sim. Turn off the cache simulation: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/obj/dopnet.html#cache It'd be great if Houdini was more setup by default to be more easily re-simmable. Sadly, it isn't.

Seems like that should be enough. Vellum, AFAIK, is OpenCL enabled by default. I've had problems, but only when my GPU wasn't recognized. Have you tried compare/contrast with a pyro sim with OpenCL on and off?

Yea, but I'm not a beginner. I've been doing this for 20 years. I should have had this nailed down by year 5. I'll certainly give myself a little leeway since I got a traditional artist education instead of an industry-centric two year vocational, which some kids get these days. That is brilliant. Yes. These days I cheat to camera as much as I can, pare down sims to the bare minimum, etc... Sure, if you work by yourself. But not at anywhere I've ever worked, ha!

If you've worked for more than a year or two in Visual effects you've likely seen or experienced yourself the dreaded call to get something PERFECT. But, as it is said "Perfect is the enemy of good enough." I bring this up because it's certainly happened to me. I've only recently in the last couple years become really comfortable with saying "screw it, this is fine". But it seems like a skill I should have mastered earlier in my career. So, hopefully a beginner will find this post and read it and save themselves some frustration. Has this ever happened to you? Has this happened recently to you? Have you been chasing down a technical solution to something when something quick and messy and by hand would have probably worked fine? Have you ever simmed and resimmed and tweaked and resimmed again and again trying to find that one set of parameters that would look great when really those few stray particles could have been deleted by hand after it was cached?

Is that something that Houdini does? Did you figure it out?

The image on the right doesn't look correct. I would trust Houdini's image viewer more than an OS's finder. Have you brought the image into a compositing package? What software sees your final deliverable?

playing around with a design, trying to make it mechanical and organic at the same time