Floating Object Character

[Macha]

Greetings fellow Houdinlings. This is my first post here. I've bumbled about in the official Apprentice forum and now that I can hold my Houdini-wand the right way up I'll hope to produce some basic but useful stuff.

I want to create an effect that shows an animated character entirely made out of floating objects. (A man made of floating cakes, or balloons, etc. (Modelling and animation is outside Houdin))

This is what I came up with so far but it isn't convincing:

I appended a Scatter SOP to an Isooffset to get points from which to emit. The particles are then bounced off from the object's wall.

But when I move the object around, the particles become too busy. I slowed them down with an Attract POP and a Drag POP but it's not working well.

I thought of using vorticles but I don't think I can use them to emit particles from, and I think they woudn't follow deforming geometry.

test.hipnc

Edited December 16, 2008 by Macha

[Macha]

Here's an update.

It works well enough when the objects aren't animated. But when they move about it goes all crazy.

If I could find a way to let the particles home back to their original birthplace...

gastest.hipnc

[ihab]

hey Macha,

welcome to houdini !

there's so many ways you can do this, spring sop is one way to go .. lay down a spring sop and check the help card and example files. another way of doing this is in a pop vop. i don't know how comfortable you are with vops but it's the way to go if you need some more control over your particles.

if you want to explore the vop pop way give me a hint and i can help you with it. I wanted to put down a simple example now but i'm in a hurry.

Cheers

[Macha]

hey Macha,

welcome to houdini !

there's so many ways you can do this, spring sop is one way to go .. lay down a spring sop and check the help card and example files. another way of doing this is in a pop vop. i don't know how comfortable you are with vops but it's the way to go if you need some more control over your particles.

if you want to explore the vop pop way give me a hint and i can help you with it. I wanted to put down a simple example now but i'm in a hurry.

Cheers

Thanks for the tips. VOPs are actually the part I'm more comfortable with

I played around with the spring SOPs and POPs but couldn't get it to work nicely. I think the spring sop needs edges (the springs) to work, and I just have points scattered in a volume. Plain POPs tend to work when the object is static or moving slowly but once I speed things up all hell brakes loose!

I need a brownian motion SOP!

Merry Christmas by the way. (I shouldn't post on such a day, but its not a holiday here)

Edited December 26, 2008 by Macha

[Macha]

Any ideas on this? I think I have no hair left.