Hey!

Say I want to have a weightmap grow to simulate waves, or something burning or spreading.

In Soft I would create a simulated ice tree and store some initial values, compare the values between point neighbours, average them somehow to make it spread, and so on, and then write those into a weightmap for rendering or use with other effects.

What's the approach in Houdini? I guess I need a DOPnet to be able to update data between frames? Do I use a SOP solver?

I'm slightly confused by the SOP solver, would love to a good resources that show how to use them in H14, the stuff I found seemed outdated, the node has changed a bit I think.

Hi,

yep, sop solver is what you're looking for, but you might want to try “Solver” asset in SOPs its a same solver just a bit friendlier.
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini14.0/nodes/sop/solver [sidefx.com]

also these might help(that is if you haven't seen them already):
https://vimeo.com/channels/pqhoudini/6660287 [vimeo.com]
https://vimeo.com/channels/pqhoudini/6663811 [vimeo.com]
https://vimeo.com/channels/pqhoudini/6663861 [vimeo.com]
https://vimeo.com/channels/pqhoudini/6663939 [vimeo.com]

Perfect, I was actually looking at those videos, but the SOP Solver seems to have changed too much for me to get it working the way he's using it.

The solver node looks perfectly simple! Great example file, cheers!

What's the main difference between the two solvers? How come it doesn't require a DOPnet?

Edit: Looks like it's got a hidden DOPnet in between which you just jump right past when you dive in, pretty cool.

“What's the main difference between the two solvers? How come it doesn't require a DOPnet? ”

there is none. the solver you add in sop-context is an asset, whereas the actual SOP-solver (rather an operator than an asset) is used in dop-context. afaik, what the asset does is: fetch the SOP into DOPs, add “simulation” data to it - just think of an simulated ICE-tree - meaning all values are updated in each step - and write that data back into SOPs. as you already recognized, you can see this by diving into the asset and looking at the node-path:
obj/geo1/d/s
“d” in this case stands for “DOP Network” and “s” for “SOP Solver”.

hope this helps.
and please correct me i´m wrong guys, i just dived into H recently.
fuat

fuat
"
hope this helps.
and please correct me i´m wrong guys, i just dived into H recently.
fuat

it's sounds good…. :-)

owlYzarc
Hi,

yep, sop solver is what you're looking for, but you might want to try “Solver” asset in SOPs its a same solver just a bit friendlier.
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini14.0/nodes/sop/solver [sidefx.com]

Thanks this help a lott !!!