emFluid like particle effects?

[phong]

Hi!

I saw an awesome particle fluid plugin which is called emFluid (http://www.mootzoid.com/html/XsiCorner/emFluid3.html) for XSI and I'd love to have something similar in Houdini. It's just incredibly fast and gives pretty good results. Do you know how one can achieve such effects in Houdini?

Thanks a lot!

Phong

[Marc]

Outside of coding your own solver? Not really . There are some external fluid tools you can use with Houdini, or tweak Houdini's own internal solver but those are your only options really.

Cheers

Marc

[Ratman]

Outside of coding your own solver? Not really . There are some external fluid tools you can use with Houdini, or tweak Houdini's own internal solver but those are your only options really.

Cheers

Marc

This.

Though I was quite successful in exporting particles from both emFluid and the ICE SPH solver via PDC and loading it into Houdini, with very minimal work. And once written out as bgeos it's quite fast, and renders great.

[anim]

...

Do you know how one can achieve such effects in Houdini?

...

it seems to me like advecting particles with low level fluid will give you something similar and quite fast

if you look at the videos you can see that he is also using low res voxel grid to advect particles.

If you need you can alter the solvers as you want without programming, you can even decide what the particles will inherit from the voxel grid and how they will react and so on

but i must admit that it's a bit slower than in XSI but with way more flexibility and freedom (and without plugin).

[symek]

it seems to me like advecting particles with low level fluid will give you something similar and quite fast

if you look at the videos you can see that he is also using low res voxel grid to advect particles.

If you need you can alter the solvers as you want without programming, you can even decide what the particles will inherit from the voxel grid and how they will react and so on

but i must admit that it's a bit slower than in XSI but with way more flexibility and freedom (and without plugin).

As anim says, you do have "something similar" in Houdini, and more... Fluid voxel force applied on particles. Speed might be an issue here, but I don't think plain's Houdini fluid solver is much slower (note that pyro for example, is much more, then simple Navier-Stroke solver).

[phong]

Interesting. I tried advecting particles by pyro fx volume, but that was waaaay too slow. I don't know if it works well with regular fluids. In emFluid they really look good. I like the way edges are forming and don't really get that look with particle/fluid combination. Maybe I need tons of particles more, but that makes interaction incredibly slow..

[edward]

It's kinda interesting that they mention Jos Stam's paper. I think(?) the method in that paper they mention is patented. Don't know if emFluids is using it though.

[jason_slab]

i'm really impressed by the speed, from the videos, i haven't played with it myself...

yes i wonder what technology they are using that they mention Jos Stam's paper...

j

[Ratman]

Also If I'm not mistaken, the difference of emFluids vs Houdini's solvers is that emFluid is mainly a fluid vector field that basically moves the particles in there, and the particles in ICE itself are very fast, so it's no surprise the solver is fast.

[phong]

I just saw emFluids in action in a production and it was incredibly fast and gave good results already in the viewport. Would be cool if there was something as fast with that quality in Houdini.

[Jason]

Also If I'm not mistaken, the difference of emFluids vs Houdini's solvers is that emFluid is mainly a fluid vector field that basically moves the particles in there, and the particles in ICE itself are very fast, so it's no surprise the solver is fast.

Combination grid+particle solvers are called FLIP fluids - Fluid Implicit Particle solvers -- which Houdini already has some support for (look at the Sand Solver). Perhaps they'll improve it in the future?