Pazuzu

When I worked on that solver (from the vimeo video) I used the standard pyroclastic noise displacement, but I used also the curvature (or you can use laplacian as well) as the main factor for the pyroclastic displacement and decimation. So yes that was my restriction/mask, mainly to have a more nicer evolving material, and I think it works, of course, the video just shows the backbone of the system, but you can have way better details developing it a bit more.

You can do it with some microsolvers, but is a bit of a pain and the resulting sdf will lack of detail. The best way is to use a vdb pipeline inside a sop solver, you will have all the vdb arsenal at your disposal.

No problem! Yes you can, thats why I did the example file with both options, the entire frame range as a job and each frame as a job as well.

Here is your example file with some modifications and two ways of doing it! I hope this helps you! Cheers! Alejandro aeb_Odforce_Tops_001.hiplc

No problem Tylerafx! Fortunately I don't need to track each injected particle to deal with volume conservation on "normal speed" sims, the uniform distribution take care of that, so there is not huge volume increase (I'd show you that in last examples I posted); But with "high speed" sims this can be a bit of a nightmare, so I'm still testing that kind of scenarios. One thing I'm doing now is to give to each fillerMask particles a life, so when this life ends the particle will try to reach the closer freeSurface edge and to then merge its location to a closer non fillerMask particle class and finally it gets deleted from the point cloud; This is working pretty well, but unfortunately the user needs to still find a good life to play with, so I'm still trying to find a way to automate this.

Yes, the freeSurface are all the particles that are in the liquid/air interface. I modified both, it mainly depends on what you want. Sometimes you want to affect everything at the volume stage of the solver to have more average results and less noise.

Thanks WhyGee, Regards freeSurface mask you have many options, you can use the curvature, density or even an edge detection technique to separate the borders. Regards sculpting controls, because is Houdini, is all about to use velocity fields for that, I think is the best way, forcing this kind of things internally will compromise the behavior, and its very important to not constraint that to reach more realism on the simulation. cheers!

Thanks Tylerafx! Regards additional particles. I always tried to not depend on hole fillers to preserve the sheeting behavior mainly because its a nightmare for everything, volume gain, mesh flickering, etc. But at the end I also implemented a way to inject particles that doesn't affect the behavior nor the meshing, it was a bit of a nightmare to tackle all this problems but at the end works pretty well. The only one that I'm still working on is the volume gain, but at very high speed sims, its a nightmare!! whithout_fillerMask_side.mp4 In this preview extracted from my last work, you can see that the point count is constant, so no dynamic particle injection or how I call it fillerMask But you can see how the sheets are preserved without any dynamic particle creation to sort of protect the shapes, or to have a good looking result. Also there is already some volume/mass preservation, the uniform distribution that is driven by a freeSurface mask maintain the particles from collapsing or to be extremely apart, so all the particles are flowing in a very smooth harmony, and this is key for a good meshing without using an extreme particle count. fillerMask_side.mp4 This is the same version as above but here I'm now using my fillerMask technique. But you can see that even with this on, the sheets looks almost the same as the above preview, so in conclusion this should be used only when you have a very fast simulation and you don't want to use so many substeps to converge to a nice solution, or if some client needs a pretty big and soap like sheet. fillerMask_metrallia.mp4 Talking about extreme cases for a filleMask use, is this example. Here in this preview you can see how the particles are created when the distribution begins to fail because of the very fast expansion, of course this is retimed, but you can see that even with fillerMask on, the sheets are still collapsing naturally so the volume gain its greatly reduced (I'm still working on to have way less volume gain). Another very important aspect when you use the fillerMask or in other cases Reseeding and you need to retime your points, both techniques can lead to weird pulses and jittering on your points and you will end up with a weird looking mesh. The solution I gave to this was to save out my simulation data directly inside the solver at the last substep stage, this ensure that I can have that substep data to have a more precise retime of my points. For this I implemented a point retimer with substep support (the default one only uses integer frames for the interpolation). I hope this make things more clear. (sorry about the video compression, its hard when you have tiny points) Thank you! Alejandro

Hi, Here is a new personal project that I did using my small scale fluid pipeline aka Tension v2.5. I hope you like it! Thanks, Alejandro

Hi Mathieu! Yes exactly, I used the gradient of the density field modulated by the laplacian to then modified the velocity of the system. One thing that I did, and I think is very important to have more precise results, is to compute both the laplacian and the gradient using a SDF version of the density field. This will give way more power to sculpt your sim as well, for example you can even displace that SDF before the laplacian and gradient computation to inject details to your sim without using noises that can mess you vel field or introduce overshooting. Also this is way more lightweight than to compute 1000's of masks to drive your sim and to end up with a very nice looking sim but so bad simulation times. I hope this is clear! Thanks, Alejandro

Here is a good way to deal with that. https://lesterbanks.com/2019/01/create-uv-based-wetmap-houdini/

Unfortunately is not possible using the default engine options to define collisions (mutual collision relationship). If you want to have a feedback like effect on your RBDs you need to create all by yourself, one way can be to use impacts from the collisions between the RBDs and particles to create a field force that can define some forces to influence the RBD behavior, this can be a bit of a nightmare because you need enough general iteration on the dynamics engine for the bullet solver to converge to a stable solution. I think the best way is to use Vellum grains + pop fluid and a simple Vellum object that can represent your "solid object", this way you will have mutual interaction between both objects. its very important that you disable the constraints on the vellum grains for the pop fluid to work better on the position integration. I hope this helps you! Cheers! Alejandro

Thanks Andrea! Attached are two screens where you can see the general particle count. I tend to not abuse the particle count to have good meshing results (so I don't use re-seeding), that's mainly because if you need to re-time you can have weird pulsing artifacts, so the only way to overcome this is to over-smooth, and that can be very expensive sometimes and will kill nice details, also boundary conditions can have flickering as well with overcrowded particle clusters closer to colliders. Instead of this I use a method to redistribute the particles to have a more uniform distribution between them, this way you can have very nice and smooth edges without so many particles and have a more clean and smooth mesh without sacrificing details.

Hi, Here is a personal project that uses a new iteration of my small scale pipeline. I still need to improve some things regards the micro-ripples but I think they are working well for this one. I hope you like it! Thanks!!

Its all about that you fill the entire volume with points, a points from volume sop will do the job, all of this has to be before the attribute creation and rasterization. Cheers!