i tried using a solver node to effect this surface. I can't get the solver node to fade out over time though, so that the colour AND the scale stops after some trailage.I know it's something to do with the interpolation bias because normally lowering that fades the colour out so i assume the same would happen if i applied it to the scaleweight attribute but no, any help would be much appreciated.

a

Had a quick look, at no point do you scale @SCALEWEIGHT down, so all the solver sop does is accumulate, leaving a solid trail.

Inside the solver, before the final null I added a point wrangle that reduces it to 90% of its value on each frame, thus making it into a fading trail:

@SCALEWEIGHT *= 0.9;


More of this is explained here: http://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php?title=The_solver_sop [tokeru.com]

thanks so much mestela

Haha…Thanks for having your “problem” and posting atron.

In my Houdini project right now I'm a bit focused on working with vex.

But your post caught my eye.

Just love this forum on how I can just load up the Houdini file and see whats going on

I've seen that type of example done in tutorials but they seem much more “pale” compared to yours.

Hope you don't mind I've saved your file as reference?

It's pretty cool what you got going there

Thumbs up !

thanks BabaJ trying to make an fibreoptic squid skin wall
learnt a lot from this forum, i also find the cg wiki really helpful