Pyro trail clusters get confused by loops

[BWoods]

Hi everyone, I've run into an issue and I'm looking for some help coming up with a work around. We've got a lot of effects that involve smoke trails from characters flying around and we've been using pyro clustering to make the trails. However there is one particular issue I just can't think of a solution to. The default cluster setup transfers the cluster number to a trailed collection of your source points and then finds the lowest source frame in each cluster in order to determine which frame each cluster container should be created on. This works fine normally, however if your trail loops back on itself or comes too close to where it was in world space at another point in the shot then the cluster gets confused as to which container should be used resulting in gaps in your trail. 

 

I've been trying to come up with a way to fix this procedurally but keep hitting dead ends. has anyone run into this issue before? Short of trying to convince animators to never have the characters loop back like this does anyone have any ideas on how to circumvent this problem?

 

Thanks in advance,

-Brandon

[Skybar]

You already have the source frame on your points, so instead of clustering based on P you could cluster based on that source frame attribute (Control Attribute on the Cluster Points SOP). And then find the lowest frame within each cluster to find creation frame.

[BWoods]

Ahh yeah super simple solution, I didn't notice you could specify that. Thanks!