another exporting particles grains question

[anthonymcgrath]

hey guys so this one is thumping my head

 

i have a popnet with some grains... its working well.

 

now i want to simply cache out this simulation to disk, then bring it to another hou file.  But what is the best way to go about that?  I'm just lost here.

 

i can cache it out a .bgeo sequence and then fetch it in with file read node into a blank hou scene but the grains have lost their spherical look and the ramp colour too ?

 

I cant for the life of me suss out how to plug this into a new popnet scene

anyone with any advice much appreciated losing my head here

ant

 

[anthonymcgrath]

attached a quick few frames of the simulation and my crappy scene setup

 

@Farmfield @mestela @ParticleSkull @Atom  hey chaps any chance you could help me with this please?  I just want to be able to bring my particle cache back in and apply the grain 'look' to them via the popnet ready for rendering at another friends computer.

sand_sim_scene.zip

[Atom]

NOTE: I don't get any notification from this website if you use the @Atom token.

 

You don't need the popnet anymore, they are already simulated. Just copy spheres, colorize and you are done.

ap_sand_sim_import.hiplc

[anthonymcgrath]

hi Atom no worries

 

so use the copy sop to put spheres onto the grains

 

is there no way to plug this back into a houdini network so i can render them as sprites as mantra normally would ?  Or is mantra just rendering spheres anyway at render time?

I'm just curious because this sim scene i've shared is low resolution you see - i need to really upres the grain count so there'd be millions of spheres :/

[anthonymcgrath]

hmmm i have a feeling it may be because somehow i've managed to bork the shader for the grains when i create a sprite shader the default texture file is smokepuff.rat instead of sphere_matte.pic - i dont know how to revert this back in the default settings though - i tried to reset default parameters for the shader but it crashes houdini every time. this could be why my grains are coming in as black squares

[Atom]

Try turning off Material display in the 3D viewport. Or switch to wireframe view. Houdini may be crashing because the viewport was linked to a texture map that you removed. By delaying the viewport update you might be able to avoid the crash.

 

To get back the default setting just make a default grain setup in a new scene and copy whatever nodes you need to reset and paste them into your existing scene.

[anthonymcgrath]

If I switch to wireframe view the colour attribute of my particle cache is there sure enough so that's something. I don't know what I've done to bork houdini here it's a bit weird as a newly created default pop sprite points to smokepuff.rat instead of sphere_matte.pic and I can't seem for revert it. Looks like it's re install time.

[mestela]

does a clean scene, make a pig, shelf->grains->dry sand display properly? I've had a few cases where the sphere sprite gets borked, usually to do with alpha or errant attribs on points, but i can't remember specifics.

 

[Guest tar]

8 hours ago, anthonymcgrath said:

If I switch to wireframe view the colour attribute of my particle cache is there sure enough so that's something. I don't know what I've done to bork houdini here it's a bit weird as a newly created default pop sprite points to smokepuff.rat instead of sphere_matte.pic and I can't seem for revert it. Looks like it's re install time.

The default sprite is the puff - the shelf tool inserts the grain sprite - a bolded parameter means non-default.