Hi

I am trying to get my head around houdini (i am new to it) and i was wondering what would be easiest way to create animated carving effect. Like drilling bone for example or butter and butter knife. Currently i can do it so that i have separate boolean object that is deformed with blend shape over time to create the “trail” left by the drill but then i have to animate both the drill and the boolean object. With the new cool booleans there must be a way to do it dynamically so that boolean effect checks its state in every frame and keeps the resulted geometry from previous frames so that i could just parent the boolean object, say sphere on tip of the drill and animate the drill only and boolean effect is created and kept from frame to frame.
Or should this kind of effect be done with changing object to particles and then killing particles / remeshing.

Another question is there a way to blend materials or change values gradually depending of the distance from (original unchanged) surface normal, or maybe using another quide mesh. As an example lets say i have bad bone tissue and i need to chip few mm off to uncover healthy bone tissue, the change from bad to healthy tissue changes gradually during certain distance, does not need to change texture necessarily but maybe diffuse, procedural texture values etc. Currently i have to create precut shapes, uv and texture them but i am hoping for more dynamic approach where i just could slice and drill (volume?) object and the material values change gradually when you go deeper inside the tissue.

With simple objects and few pieces precutting and texturing is viable option but if i have complex deformed shape and maybe some procedurally generated geometry in it like spongy inner bone tissue then it becomes real headache to precut and texture all that geometry. Houdini looks like it maybe could do the stuff more dynamically but since i have no experience of it i dont know is there even a way to achieve this.

Or if you can point me to tutorials that cover these kind of issues i would greatly appreciate it.

for your first question - check out the Solver SOP…
see the attached file

Thanks Michael, this is exactly what i needed