Assigning Different Sprites To Particle Groups In One Pop

[farhan]

Hi,

I'm doing an animation for bullet hits on a wall. I used a Split after the impact to create the following elements; flash of fire, sparks, debris and dust. I've built it so it all happens in one POP, with a collect node gathering together all these elements at the end.

The question I have is this; the puff of dust split will emit only a couple of particles which will be very large in scale and will be sprites with lots on nice smokey textures on. The other particles will be points or sprites showing fire textures.

Under this node in the tree I've popped in a Sprite POP, but I fear I may have to go up to the object level to apply the sprite shader, which if true will be a real shame as I've got this whole interaction between the particles in my Popnetwork. Is there a way (by using the sprite POP) I can apply different sizes and sprites to each group of particles and have them render without overriding them all at object level?

In other software (not to mention any names) I can use a sprite wizard for each individual particle object so they could have different sprites attached. I want to do the same but use the one Popnet to hold my different elements rather than having four different elements at the top level.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Farhan

[ihab]

you can attach the shader at the sops level instead. use a "pop merge" sop to bring the particles into sops if your particle system is at /POPs or (part) in the new houdini 9 speach. If however you created a pop network inside sops and used it for your particle system then all you have to do is attach a material sop after the pop network and assign different shaders to different groups coming out of pops

hope this helps

[farhan]

Hi thanks for that. my poarticle network was inside a SOP, I attached the material nodes at the SOP level after the PopNet node. Strange thing though, when I went to group pulldown menu I couldn't access any of the groups in the Popnet (middle mousing over the popnet showed they were all well and alive, telling me how many are in each group). I threw in an attribCreate node in after the popnet and that was able to see all the groups okay. Maybe 'Group' under material means something else?

In the end I reverted back to Houdini 8 to do this. I followed a tutorial from 3dBuzz, where they render sprites out. In the obj level of the particle system I went to the 'Render' tab and under 'Mantra Procedure' I put in 'sprite'. This works fine for me. But does anyone know where the Mantra Procedure in Houdini 9 is. I kept searching and searching, which is why I had to revert back a version.

[stevenong]

Have you tried searching through the Help Browser?

http://localhost:48626/nodes/shop/vm_geo_sprite?q=sprite

Procedurals in H9 are found under SHOPs.

Cheers!

steven