Hello BrainTrust. This one's easy.

[kleer001]

Hi Y'all!

It's been a while. Man I'm happy to still be workin' in production with Houdini, damn!

Quick question. Any brainstormers please peep up.

Here's the effect: Dissolving skeleton.

Where would you start?

I've got tetrahedronized volume, voroni sorted volume particles. I can polygonize the particles and then break them up on the fly (I hope I can). They break in big chunks, fall, then break again, then dusty swirling. Classic, no?

I was thinking of a hand drawn texture map as well. I'm not sure about painting a single texture map over such a complicated topology. Like anything it's gotta be art directed up the ying yang. I was also thinking of painting, baking out, painting, baking out... one frame at a time. It's only 100 or so, so not that bad. The camera's moving a lot, that's always good.

Have you done an effect like that? Seems like a lot of vampire movies out there, would have be reinvented dozens of times.

much obliged,

Clear

[sam.h]

Maybe this would be a small piece of your puzzle: http://ihoudini.blogspot.com/2009/05/growing-objects.html

In reverse of course...

[j35ta]

you need an animted cloud of pionts representing centres of chunks to blow away. Use trail SOP to calculate v.

rest cloud of same.

use magnet SOP to alter rest cloud colour ( release attribute )

In POPs set up sim to to give a nice effect for blowy away bits. Source POP births on impulse at first frame the same number of points at SOP level.

Cretae two groups in POPS, birthed and not, based on the colour from outside the POP network.

Use position POP to place non-birthed group back at position of incoming animated points.

Should do it.