Whatsinaname

Use some dissipation, I think that might help a lot.

That weird pyramid in the bg? My first guess would be some rogue particles at arbitrary positions making the meshing algorithm go crazy. Try creating a bounding box around the area of you want to mesh and kill everything that is outside that area. On top of that, delete any attribute that you don't need for meshing, using an attribute delete before using the particle surface SOP. It could also be a weird hiccup...try adding a slightly different number to your Particle Separation value, something like 0.11 instead of 0.1. See if the odd structure is generated with slightly different settings.

Inside your FLIP sim, look for the FLIPobject > VIsualisation > Collision. Turn that on. Run a few frames of the sim, so you can see how the solver sees your collision object. My guess is that it might be all over the place. Ideally, you want a closed (no holes) model for this purpose, therefore you will have to create a proxy of your boat to make it collide.

This is a relatively complex effect and not something you can easily do out of the box. I'd suggest you try getting the layering behaviour right, first. You could achieve this by looking into Viscosity (FLIP Solver> Volume Motion > Viscosity). Use this as a starting point: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/fluid/lava.html After that is more or less working, you could have this interact with an underlying fluid, or maybe fake it with some geometry.

Hm...how about some attribute blur on P...?

FBX comes with a bit of an overhead and it can be tough to get the settings right. If it is not an animated object, you might want to use something else. red/snowflake is referring to the orangey-red button on your SOPs. if you zoom in closely, you'll see it is represented by a snowflake icon. If you activate this, your modelling history will be baked into this very node, similar to 'delete history' in Maya.

Depends on what you want to do. Splitting up the clusters so they can get simulated on individual machines or in individual chunks is one thing. I'm not further elaborating on this here unless this is your question. If you simulate all your clusters in one go on a single machine, Houdini assigns a primitive group to the individual smoke objects that are generated during the cluster sim. You probably see some groups like smokeobject1_1, smokeobject1_2.... smokeobject1_6 Each of those groups represents one cluster. If you now use e.g. a Blast, you can separate the individual clusters from your caches.

Inside the FLIP solver,reduce Volume Motion > Velocity Smoothing to something like 0.001.

Maya is using a different interpretation when it comes to scaling and units. For the scale to work in Houdini, you have to scale it inside Houdini so that 1m of your boat equals one Houdini unit, no matter what it says it was in Maya. Try it, I suppose it will work.

If you want feedback information, you need a solver.

I took a quick look at your scene. As it seems, you are using the default values Houdini is setting up for you when using the shelf tool. Unfortunately, these auto-generated setups are often very messy. The boat object in your scene was missing, so I couldn't test anything. However, it feels to me your tank is huge. How are you bringing in the boat? Has it been modelled in a different application and then brought into Houdini? If so, check it's scale...it could be 10 times larger than real-world scale, leading to some extreme forces accumulating during the simulation. Just check the Houdini grid...the units displayed on the grid are meters. If you want, you can also create an object called 'Tommy', which gives you a human-sized model. So first and foremost...is your scale set up properly?

Have you tried the FindShortestPathSOP?

Without looking at your file: - deactivate Reseeding in your FLIP solver > Particle Motion > Reseeding. Are the Splashes still way too extreme? - You might be over smoothing your sim, this is why it feels too slow. FLIP Solver > Volume Motion > Velocity Smoothing. When using the Splashy Kernel, the default is 0.1, which I think is way too much, try something like 0.01 or 0.005...or maybe change to FLIP/APIC by changing the Kernel to Swirly.

- Are you using a POP Advect by volume or any other technique? - Maybe check the actual volume resolution?

Without looking at your file... - Do you need it to be an FBX file or could alternative formats also work? - Have you tried freezing (red/snowflake) your geometry before exporting it? - Have you tried cacheing it after doing any operations to it? - Is the geo broken? Laminar faces? Polys with 5+ edges? You can check with PolyDoctor. Also make sure to delete any attributes, groups etc you don't need before exporting. Maybe add a cleanSOP