Dust Puff on particleSop

[b_pancakes]

I've created a series of particle SOPS in order to simulate a dust cloud (similar to the one from "The Mummy"). I'm trying to create a cloud where there are vortex objects up front and then a steady cloud in the back(and at the end, a face comes through the cloud) and particle SOPS seemed to be the best way to do that.

I'm having a problem at render time however and was hoping someone could help me out. A friend is doing a similar sand based effect and he was able to get great looking results using the Dust Puff sprite material (he got his sim working all in the Pop network). My problem is that I'm having a hard time rendering my particles from a particle SOP as sprites. Does anyone have any ideas for how I could set that up?

I looked around for a long while to find out any other info on how to do this and nothing seemed to be out there(for houdini 10 anyway, for earlier houdini a 3D buzz tutorial said to use the Geometry tab on the Render parameters box to render as sprite but that doesn't exist in houdini 10 that I could find.)

Thanks for any help!

Oh and I was going to use displacement to get the face to form from the clouds but didn't have any luck, has anyone done that before?

Dust15.hipnc

[mightcouldb1]

I always use a POP network instead of a particle node. As far as I know, no one uses that anymore. Your sprites are rendering, they are just really small. Not sure about the displacement thing, but you'd probably want to go with geometry instead of displacement. There was a topic posted not too long ago about emitting sprites from displaced geo.

Good luck,

Jason

[b_pancakes]

Your sprites are rendering, they are just really small.

Do you know where I can go to adjust the sprite properties? I see the render as spheres or disks option etc... in the render tab of my particle SOP node but it seems like the size variable there gets overridden when I apply the Dust Puff material. And yeah I would have done Pops for this if I'd known it would be more difficult but its too late for this project.

EDIT: And yeah I saw the topic about emitting sprites from displaced geo, but I need to do the reverse of that, I'd like to use an animated displacement map on a particle sim.

Edited January 30, 2010 by b_pancakes

[b_pancakes]

It appears to me like Houdini 10 does everything the same as is advised on this post except for the geometry render settings: http://www.sidefx.com/forum_index.php?page=viewtopic&t=5542&highlight=&sid=7caa32eb228c3a42dba40fed1a38e563

From what I can tell, there used to be a tool underneath the Render->Geometry tab in the parameters window that let you specify a mantra procedure for rendering that needed to be set to "sprite". Does anyone know where this went too?

[b_pancakes]

I finally got it and figured I'd post a link to the post that helped me so that others could benefit if they have the same issues:

yeah the link was here the whole time, I just couldn't find it. Thanks!