Whitewater manual setup

[harima]

Hi all

 

First post here as I am a fairly new excited Houdini user.

Here it goes.

 

I understand how to use the whitewater shelf tool by selecting my flip fluid and all is good.

 

Problem arises when I try to first render out the fluid simulation as bgeo (making sure I also output surface and vel) and then open this in a file and set the whitewater emission from it.

So shelf tool doesnt work cause it asks for a fluid.

What I do then is set the source by plugin the whitewater source node after my file

Then inside a dopnet I create whitewater object,emitter and solver. My problem is that the surface and vel fields are not coming in the whitewater object.

If I dive inside whitewater object I can see the scalarfield and vectorfield but no place to direct them to my fields. So I tried replacing them with sopscalarfield and sopvectorfield nodes so I can reference my fields from the file, I also set to always the time the sop directory and the sop dimensions.

The result looks like it kind of works but when I compare itwith the result of whitewater when set with shelf tools by selecting the flip fluid sim its different and obviously wrong.

 

What I dont understand is how the shelf tool  reference the fields in the whitewater object . Whats the difference between scalarfield and sopscalarfield node. In my mind scalarfield node doesnt make whole lot of sense as there is no place to reference the field.

 

Would you just use the shelf tool by looking at the flip sim? Isnt that a very slow process to keep alive two simulations? I was trying to do it myway thinking that its faster to have the base sim baked out.

 

Thank you all

 

 

[Skybar]

Right, it seems you are overcomplicating stuff. When you first create a FLIP sim from the shelf you get everything set up for you - a DOP net where the simulations takes place, and another Geo node where it gets meshed. Go into that one and take a look at the top-most SOP, it's an DOP I/O I believe. That SOP is where the Whitewater will look at later when you create whitewater from the shelf, regardless of it needing you to choose the FLIP object in your dopnet. So, simply cache your FLIP sim at that DOP I/O SOP and tick "Load from disk", and you are all set to get your whitewater working.

[harima]

Ah thats cool ! Didnt know that! Thanx for the tip!

Although I always try to figure out how the shelfes are working so to actually know what I am doing and it messes me I cant redo correctly this simple setup manually.

Its a long road anyway!

Thanx again cheers!