Downloaded the bubbles example for H20...

During the demo it all seemed so easy :-) Just a bubble solver.

This partly shows the general problem or opportunity with Houdini - lack of middle level nodes.

If you open that content file, I mean sure there's bubbles, but with 50 plus nodes. Nothing close to artist friendly. It's kind of like advertising a cake and instead of getting a cake, you'd get all the basic chemical ingredients that make up the sugar that you need to make etc. But you can't be just a cake baker. You have to be a chemist first...

But... what is actually new in there? The web site mentions a new bubble solver... I don't see anything like that. It seems not much dif that bubbles from Entagma tutorial from years ago? There's nothing 'out of the box' for bubbles based on my initial view. Am I missing something?

Not sure where it ever said "Bubble Solver", it's bubble generator. When you opened the example did you take some time to inspect the network at all? It's literally a single user-friendly node that take points with a pscale attribute and a collision mesh and generates non-intersecting bubbles. Is this not the kind of tool that you were complaining about not getting in your other post? It's about as out-of-the-box as it gets...

Thanks

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini20.0/nodes/sop/remeshbubbles.html [www.sidefx.com]

Happy learning!

Fair warning to any beginners who download that scene: it's very heavy and is configured to load cached geometry which isn't included. You'll need to click Save to Disk on the two File Cache nodes to save it on your system, which could take like an hour on the second one.

BrianHanke
Fair warning to any beginners who download that scene: it's very heavy and is configured to load cached geometry which isn't included. You'll need to click Save to Disk on the two File Cache nodes to save it on your system, which could take like an hour on the second one.

Yup. That’s true for many of the cloud examples as well. One or two took about 6 min just to open. The clouds do look amazing though. Same with the feathers. I literally kept rendering the eagle and staring at it lol. And it was rendering in minutes. Pretty amazing.

The bubbles look great too! (Once you get the scene working.)

The more I dig into it the more I feel like it could be improved. A resolution frequency of 6 seems like overkill on the final remesh pass. I just did 3 and it looks fine and caches to disk in like two minutes. (Edit: 3 doesn't look fine when rendering. By all means set it that low to explore the scene, but for the final render it will need to be 6-ish for sure.)

Also, the env light and gobo textures are missing and the path to the background prim is wrong.

BrianHanke
Also, the env light and gobo textures are missing and the path to the background prim is wrong.

Log a bug so that the example can be improved.