converting particles to a liquid volume

[human]

Hi all! This is my first post here (only been working with Houdini for about a month), and I must admit, I am a bit nervous, being such a novice among the company of some truly talented technical artists. I apologize in advance for any ignorance in my question.

Here is my situation/question:

I want to render particles as a liquid fluid. I have been following this forum some and discovered some very helpful topics about converting particles to a smoke fluid (take this thread for example: ).

I've been able to reproduce results similar to the thread I linked when dealing with going from particles to smoke, but I have had absolutely no success when trying to go from particles to liquid. I have tried tweaking the parameters/shading on the smoke to make it look like a liquid, but then I still have the problem of the smoke continually growing and filling the volume container, and just generally not being able to be controlled in the manner I want it to be.

To give a context for the effect I am trying to produce, it is for a digital short in the style of a Chinese ink painting. A fish is supposed to come to life in the painting and jump around leaving an ink trail behind it. Over the course of the short, the ink trail becomes liquid water and adds color to the scene.

Any and all advice is more than welcome.

Thanks all!

[rende]

If you have access to realflow you can try exporting the particles as a RF bin sequence and meshing it in realflow.

[pclaes]

I've been able to reproduce results similar to the thread I linked when dealing with going from particles to smoke, but I have had absolutely no success when trying to go from particles to liquid. I have tried tweaking the parameters/shading on the smoke to make it look like a liquid, but then I still have the problem of the smoke continually growing and filling the volume container, and just generally not being able to be controlled in the manner I want it to be.

You will need a very hard bound rather then a soft ramp, you should be able to remap those values - at shader level, and create almost a black and white mask. The growing of the smoke and filling of the container could probably be solved by adding a Gas Dissipate microsolver in your dop network to your solver, that should give you enough control on where the volume is eaten away.

I don't know what kind of liquid you are going for exactly, but generally liquid is done using particles (sph) rather than voxels (cfd).

[human]

I don't know what kind of liquid you are going for exactly, but generally liquid is done using particles (sph) rather than voxels (cfd).

Thanks, I scraped my technique and started from scratch using particle fluids and I'm already getting better results.

The type of effect I'm going for is pretty much exactly like the commercial they linked on the odforce homepage or found here:

">http://www.troublemakers.tv/weareflink_niko_tziopanos_CCTV_ink.html#

[borisb2]

Thanks, I scraped my technique and started from scratch using particle fluids and I'm already getting better results.

The type of effect I'm going for is pretty much exactly like the commercial they linked on the odforce homepage or found here:

">http://www.troublemakers.tv/weareflink_niko_tziopanos_CCTV_ink.html#

Can you explain a bit more how you've solved it now?

Cheers

[Netvudu]

I don´t know what he finally did, but in case it helps you, what I would do is generate particles from the objects, then advect those particles with a fluid SDF, and then use the particle Fluid Surface SOP to create the mesh around those particles.