ryew

I couldn't say; I wasn't able to run your later file and didn't try to debug it since the previous file worked and seemed enough to go by

I was under the impression the higher resolution settings would be wasted at a lower-res simulation (and they do increase the per-frame sourcing time), but seeing how the sim changes when setting either or both the pyrosource and rasterize settings to 0.1 does show them having an impact, so it does appear to matter. I would have thought the higher resolution values in sourcing would simply be averaged or maxed when solved at 0.1 voxel resolution, but it doesn't seem like that is quite what is happening. Diving down into those nodes might better explain what their doing under the hood, but in the meantime that's a good catch, and an interesting observation to experiment with.

The new scene didn't work for me, but here's a quick modification of the first one with viscosity and density modifications disabled; the velocities match between input and sim. motionFromAnim_mod.hiplc

At a guess, your density and viscosity settings might be dampening the input velocity - try leaving them at default values to see what effect your input velocities are having unless you specifically need to modify them; if it's still an issue, try adding a multiplier to your velocity to scale it up. If it's still the same project, feel free to upload the .hip file on its own and I'll take a look when I have a moment.

Try this series of videos out from HoudiniSimon, he explains things pretty well and provides some .hip files

You could be overthinking it and may be able to just do what you're after in a single system. Since you're sourcing from points for all the parts you want already, try transferring the velocity of the character points to your background image points (attribute transfer or copy and blur, etc.) and/or add some custom velocities timed with the motion of the character as well to create the swirling you want (don't worry about creating a specific system itself, everything is a cheat - whatever gets you the end look is valid).

"Spark Shooters" is probably a pretty good description, I think they show up in pretty much every Michael Bay movie that has some sort of destruction. They look like just tons of sparks being emitted like you suspect, like hand-held sparklers you can buy at the store, but tons of them (and flying).

Ah, yes, a different use case here. I'm sure someone in the Games subgroup here or on SideFXs forums can offer additional ideas or clarify the Houdini<->Unity best practices for this sort of thing

Have you tried the technique in the Entagma tutorial https://entagma.com/houdini-baking-point-attributes-to-textures/ ?

Given how wildly varying the center would be depending on the shape, it would be helpful to see an image of the type of surface you're attempting this on.

I would suggest posting this issue to the SideFX forums if you haven't done so already, although they do visit here sometimes, there is a far greater chance a SideFX engineer will see it over there to investigate or explain. Perhaps this is a known bug

I don't have enough experience in Solaris to provide insight on this, but have you already checked out the existing tutorials regarding instancing? ex: https://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php?title=HoudiniLops and

Check out youtube - there are multiple shockwave tutorials on there you can likely modify for your needs

It would be best to post even a simple example scene that demonstrates the issue you're dealing with in order to help others help you As much as the forum community wants to help each other, building scenes from scratch and trying to guess at your workflow takes time many busy people cannot spare

Great, glad to hear it helped!