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Particles Types


baq

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Particles Types:

Hi everyone.

I noticed only four particles types in Houdini: spheres, lines, points and sprites. Comparing to Maya which have: point, ,multiPoint, strikes, multiStrikes, spheres, blobbies, clouds, sprites, doesn't look good for Houdini.

I wonder if in professional productions, FX studios use diffrent particle types? Why Maya have so many types?

Which particles give the best possibilities and flexibility?

Can someone from DD answer?

Greetz

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Which part doesn't look good for houdini ;) I'm not from DD, but anyhow: Maya has a bunch of hardware-only particle types and I don't think houdini offers HQ-hardware rendering as Maya does, but if you render points / lines etc. with mantra the speed almost equals and you have the advantage of not being limited by the hardware renderer here (reflections, DOF, shading models). You can easily create the sphere, multistreak, multipoint kinda particles types in houdini using the copy SOP.

Actually houdini has a couple of advantages compared to the "out-of-the-box" maya:

i) software renderable sprites!!! In Maya you'd need to get mayaman + air or mtor for this.

ii) you can instance (copy SOP) any type of geometry to your particles, and do "perParticle Attributes" (using the point SOP you can do all these things). Instances in Maya have the lil disadvantage that creating perInstanceColor attributes isn't properly possible. You can easily override the velocity vector on your particle objects in houdini and as far as I know maya won't allow you this either. Until recently Maya didn't even support motion blurred particles and this was really annoying at times.

iii) check the metaballs in houdini, they give you fair amount more control compared to Maya and are more flexible (for instance you can use them to create those nice i3d volumetric textures)

iv) ... and this leads to another cool feature: you have a nice raymarcher for volumetrics in Houdini. B)

One kinda shortcoming concerning object types: I couldn't find any volumetric primitive types in houdini so far (and I don't think they exist): Cloud/Tube-sw have no direct equal in houdini unless I missed something. But I guess there are good work arounds for this as well. Anyhow my point is: the number of particle types doesn't matter really. Maya has some specialised particle types and they might be a bit faster compared to an houdini copy SOP solution, but usually you gain more flexiblity & possiblities and this likely outweights the slight speed difference.

Jens

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Cloud/Tube sw(SoftWare) is a volumetric primitive type with a volume & surface Shader. Cloud is a sphere and the main point of the tube type is to have some way to bypass the need of motionblur really e.g. if you'd want to create spark type effects in Maya with software rendering. All those particle types such as point, streak... are hardware only.

Back on the cloud/tube sw particles types: they have a volume shader attached and a simple surface shader. The surface shader part is mainly used for shadowcasting and if you're careful you can somewhat fake selfshadowing effects via bumpmapping. The volume shader has a built-in noise and you can adjust/texture the density dropoff, ambient, incandescence, color and transparency. And it renders reasonably fast.

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I wanna change app from Maya to Houdini and my main focus area are particles so I wonder is it worth to change soft and what makes app H better of app M :)

-Is Houdini particles have something like in example: Maya Goals?

-In Maya I very often need to write code in Mel for particles. Even for change color or opacity or to attach diffrent fields on particles. I also seen Kolektiv DVD(tutorial for Maya) where one of Maya master show how to achieve one little more complicated effect and he written a lot of code. Mel here, mel there and a bit of mel there. This is meloholizm.

So I wonder if I wanna achieve more complicated particle effect in Houdini also should code o lot or not???

What other advantages and disadvantages have Houdini comparing to Maya particles?

Thnx for answers

Greetz

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Actually, that's the beauty of Houdini, you won't be writing as many codes apart from a couple of expressions. :) Now, when you REALLY need to write codes, there's VEx. :) So in that respect, I think you might as well say "Houdini is artist friendly". :)

Hey, I am definitely not from technical/CS backgrounds.

Cheers,

Alex

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