Learning Houdini and having trouble creating “raining boxes”.

I'm emitting particles, copying a box to each particle, then killing the particles after they're born. I then specify $FF for the RBD Packed Object's creation frame, but boxes are only born on the first frame, not every frame. This worked fine on my laptop but isn't working on my desktop at work. I've attached the simple scene file in hopes someone can point me in the right direction.

Is this the best way to achieve the effect? Should I be going about this another way? Thanks in advance for any help / guidance.

Hey Grant,

I checked your hip file. The way your emitting the cubes seem to works, but your are not using the packed primitive at it best.

In your case, if you take a look at the details view, you can see at each frame a new DOP objects is added and you loose the advantage of the packed primitive. Basically it make one primitive per ie cube, but store it in only one DOP object.

If you check the attached file.
I setuped the emission differently using a sop solver and a multi solver. I set back the creation frame in the Packed obj to 1, but I'm adding to it each frame with the sop solver. If you check inside, it's taking the the dop obj and merge the new created cubes each frame.

If you want to get more about packed primitives, take a look at this video from Sidefx.

https://vimeo.com/80840429 [vimeo.com]

Cheers

Doum

Thanks so much for your reply Doum! Incredibly helpful, this will serve as the basis for a lot of the stuff I want to do in Houdini. Really appreciate it.

All of the magic seems to be happening in sopsolver1. At first glance there's not much in there that's familiar to me so it will take a bit to digest.

I'm honestly surprised it's not more straightforward to emit geometry and kick it into a physics simulation, but as long as this works I'll hopefully only need to set it up once

Maybe I forgot to say, I'm not a master in houdini and even less in dop context. Maybe there is another more straightforward way to emit rbd objects.

I understand that you are maybe lost. I think you come from softimage ? no? I think I saw your name on the list a couple of time? or maybe not.

At first, it could take some time to understand how it works, but once you start getting it, erverything seem easier to accomplish than other softwares.

good luick with your learning and do not hesitate to post here or on odforce, people are not afraid to share there knowledge.

CHeers

Doum