Hi

I'm quite new in Houdini and am currently trying to do one of my major projects for uni using it. I'm trying to form a person dancing using particles. I'm using alembic cache for this purpose. So far I have it so the particles are attracted and sticking to the body, but they are not exactly forming it.

(Imagine leaves on the ground, which are blown away by a wind force and then forming a human dancing) It's sort of needs to be like morphing but onto an alembic cache.

I am working in H15 and am using popcollisiondetect and popinteract at the moment, but not really succeeding in using them properly, I don't think.

Is there anything I am not doing right or missing?

Thanks
Rosi

Use more particles, or add a popreplicate to the initial scatter. This will allow you to use a lower scatter count and yet still fill out smaller areas like fingers and hands.

What I would also consider is scattering the same amount of particles inside the dancer geometry and use the PopSteerSeek to continuously seek those goals via custom VEX code. Collision and interact can still help out. But with a continuous seek you have the option of breaking and overshoot as well.

You might be able to use a PopCurve to cause the particle to initially travel down a curve to the final location of the dancer. In that kind of suggested setup you need to animate the Activation of each force in a series. For instance PopCurve is on for 24 frames then turns off. At frame #24 PopSteerSeek turns on and take over guiding the particles.

Animating Activation for a series of PopForce nodes can help you build complex effects.

Have you seen the stick pops to surface example file [tokeru.com]?

I got a lot out of watching Varomix's Turn Geometry into particles video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBZM387_SYg [youtube.com]

Thanks for the reply!

I have tried using curves before, but they also have to be controlled manually ( I thought). Is there any way to build curves procedurally so they wrap around the character as the particles form him?

Just use a helix style curve shape and work form the bottom up or top down.