Trouble with debris shelf tool

[MJNorris]

Hi All,

 

I'm relatively new to Houdini and I'm working on a destruction sim of a car hitting a crystal/ice statue. I'm really close to getting a result that I'm happy with but I've hit a brick wall trying to get a fine spray of particles as a secondary effect.

 

Here's what I have done so far:

 

1. import statue GEO and use a combination of cookie SOPs and Voronoi Fracture to pre-divide the mesh into groups.

 

2. create an RBD sim using the RBDglueObject node, bring in the low-res car proxy and use it as a collision object.

 

3. smash car into statue. 

 

4. cache out the RBD as a .bgeo sequence.

 

5. read in the cache and everything works fine!

 

6. press the debris shelf tool, this is where things start getting confusing.

 

so I'm getting several odd results,

 

firstly I have to run the sim from frame1, despite having set the debris_sim node start frame value to the correct frame (512). 

 

I'm also really confused about the relationship between the constantBirthrate attribute of the POP_replicate node and the constantBirthRate attribute of the POP_source node. My end goal is to use the particles to instance some very simple geo with a copy SOP, however when I do this I find that where I thought there was just one particle, there are actually a load of particles, all occupying the same space, resulting in loads of copies of geo overlapping each other!

 

I haven't uploaded a scene file because my scene is a little heavy but if anybody needs one I'll upload a simplified version with the cache as a .zip

 

Many thanks in advance and any advice or help at all is much appreciated.

 

M.

 

 

 

[ciliath]

A bit hard to know were the problem lies without a scene to look at xD

but um, what are you using the replicate node for? could be the culprit to you particle problem?