Mesh Jitter

[breadbox]

trying to simulate a relatively low particle sim in Houdini and mesh with the particle fluid surface. my goal is to be able to create content very quickly.

I like the look of the mesh when I use a pretty coarse mesh. (also because it meshes fast and simulates fast) however it pops quite a bit from frame to frame. when I lower the step size to get a finer mesh the poping is gone, however the mesh looks more blobby not quite what id like aesthetically. I like how in the coarse mesh the fluid looks spikey and a bit angular.

Is there any way to run a post stabilization on a mesh sequence to sort of smooth the motion out.

The answer seems that I could run more particles and try to generate the shapes more accurately in the fluid a more dense particle cloud then to mesh a dense mesh. But the nature of the sim would be kind of difficult to capture, at that point I might as well do it in real flow.

I like the fact that the fluid gets reduced to a low poly spiky look (i can always run a subdivide and smooth on it so the mesh will look clean), however thats going to produce poping frame to frame, so some kind of stabilization on a low res mesh seems like the best way. any ideas?

the particle sim is basically curl noise emmiting from a very small sphere. so really there is not much shape to the particles other than a line.

[ikarus]

throw a peak sop after the surfacer and make it some negative value, it should help reduce the blobbyness

[breadbox]

throw a peak sop after the surfacer and make it some negative value, it should help reduce the blobbyness

yes tried it... tried successions of smooth and peak it does help to a certain extent, however the surface intersects with itself and still doesn't quite reduce the blobby enough to do it look like the low res spikey mesh

Edited September 16, 2011 by breadbox

[breadbox]

yes tried it... tried successions of smooth and peak it does help to a certain extent, however the surface intersects with itself and still doesn't quite reduce the blobby enough to do it look like the low res spikey mesh

actually.. tried it again. it's not as bad as I thought. looks pretty good. using a for loop with a peak and smooth inside to try to keep the surface from intersecting with itself while pinching everything to be more pointy.

it is fairly slow unfortunately because in order to get a smooth mesh that doesn't jitter, I'll have to use a fairly low step size on the particle fluid surface node.

I guess its to be expected.