tony

The Mill is looking for an FX TD to help support an interesting long form job with a large destruction sequence, starting as soon as the 28th February 2022 until 14th April 2022 in our London studio. Ideally we would be looking for an experienced artist in the world of long form work. Let us know you are interested - more details below: https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/TechnicolorCreativeStudios1/743999806995295-fx-td [jobs.smartrecruiters.com]

Instead of using spheres, you could just replace each sphere with a point at it's centre and assign it a pscale attribute which is the radius of the sphere. Then you can use vdbfromparticles and get a perfect sphere for each one.

Have you tried rendering it? It may just be that your viewport is set up to not show the volume at it's full resolution. You could try putting down a volume visualisation node and setting max vis res to 1024 or 2048. If that fails, it'll probably be to do with the pscale on your points - If it's too big they'll just stamp in to the volume as big spheres and you'll lose lots of detail.

Try caching the result of your popnet before you put it through the trail and add nodes at the end.

I generally find the scaling by 10 solution works well for me - not had any noticeable accuracy issues with it. Is a bit annoying having to adjust all forces and colliding objects etc though. I usually combine this method with some wrangles which drag and deactivate the pieces once they get too slow (similar to what Juraj detailed above).

If you just want to push particles away from the surface you could use a pop attract. Drop one down in your pop network, set attraction type (under the goal tab) to "points", set the sop path to point to your source geometry and Force scale (under the force tab) to a negative number. To make it only happen when your red circle appears at the end, just key the force scale parameter.

I think this is what you're after: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/copy/tutorial_stamping (you can skip down to the bottom where they create the stamping variable)

As well as missing the 3d functions, Natron doesn't support deep compositing either I believe. It's pretty useful for a basic comp though.

Check out Graham's posts in this thread: http://forums.odforce.net/topic/12280-colour-codes/?page=3

Have you tried just multiplying up the density value after the vdbfromparticles? Just put down a volume wrangle and do something like: @density*=10;

Is this what you're after? TA_TearingClothTest_v003.hiplc

Thanks for the advice guys :-) In the end I've opted to go for the Gridworks cloud option. From the tests I've done I've been very impressed. It's not perfect yet, but they've definitely done enough to convince me for now.

I'm an fx artist and am looking to start taking on some freelance work from home soon. I'm having the debate as to whether it would be better to build/buy a custom render farm for home or to try and take advantage of the cloud options that are available. I've put a summary of the info I've gathered so far below and I'd be grateful if anybody could offer any advice on this topic or correct anything I might have got wrong below. Cheers, Tony Cloud Rendering I've seen Amazon and Gridmarkets mentioned here on odforce and the sidefx forums. They seem to be the most popular options, but I also found this list: http://rentrender.com/houdini-render-farms/ of different cloud render farms that apparently support Houdini. Amazon This seems like a good option as it is the most well documented/tested so far. My main concern though is that I've been reading through the docs and it seems the process for me to simulate and render something would be: 1. upload hip file 2. do sim 3. download sim files 4. upload hip file again with sim files 5. do render 6. download render (or do the sim locally at home and skip steps 1-3) This seems like it would be problematic if the simulation is big, as it would take a very long time to upload/download the sim data. It sounds like it would be a good solution if I'm just trying to render a simpler scene, but I don't think it will be feasible for fx work with large sims. Gridmarkets I've just signed up for the beta, so will try to update this once I've done some tests. I'm hopeful this can solve the problem outlined above though based on this video: I don't seem to be able to find any cost info on there website so it's hard to know if this would be a feasible solution at the moment. Home Render Farm From what I've read so far, either custom building or buying a second hand rack/blade server would be the best option for a home farm. The main pros of a home farm I can see are: 1. Once the initial outlay for hardware is done, it should be a lot cheaper to run than constantly paying an online render farm company. 2. It should be a lot faster as all of the hardware would be on site, so I wouldn't constantly be uploading/downloading data from the the web. 3. There's less security issues to worry about (I can see clients/companies potentially not liking the idea of the project data being uploaded to an online farm for rendering/simulating). 4. I can customize it to my exact needs. My main concerns about a home farm are: 1. The initial costs are going to be high. 2. It's going to run up my electricity bills. 3. It's going to take up space in my house and generate noise. 4. It's going to generate a lot of heat. 6. Having to do all of the initial set up/build is going to take some time. 7. If something goes wrong with the hardware or farm software, I have to do all of the debugging and pay for any replacement parts if needed.

How about something like this? TA__Point_follow_next_point_in_line_01.hiplc

Have you double checked the image in mplay to see that the channels definitely aren't in there?