Thanks jsmack,
Your right, the displace node gives the same results as when using a fit node…(meaning there is no need to fit)
I was thrown off by the default values, and thought it would look correct out of the box.
In some of the early tests I was using a JPG image for the displacements, switching over to the EXR version fixed the problems.
Still, looks like there is always a certain amount of tweaking needed on our part, especially if I adjust the scale of the model etc

Thanks for the detailed answer!
I didn't know that a normal map needs to connect to a displace node, that fixed it for me, and with further testing when using displacement there is no need for the normal map.

I noticed that the megascans displacement maps have a strange range(depends on asset), so a fit range can get most of the details back, but perhaps it's simply better to use the high poly source model as it has all the details already in it.
Thanks for the help

Almost forgot, when inside a material builder, why cant I render only a specific texture when dragging it into the IPR render view, while there are no issues doing it when the same material is not packed into a material builder?
Is it a bug? or my understanding of the material builder is flawed?

Hi everyone,
I have a few questions regarding shading with Mantra, been playing around with displacements and megascans materials, trying to understand the various setups(long time v-ray user), I would be very grateful for some help from the experts here

1. Is there a reason why the principled shader gives me a different render when its inside a material builder or outside in the general “mat” page? I thought the material builder is like a way to package the material to have a more tidy workplace(attaching images to show the issue) - this issue seems to be linked to the object render tab -dicing -full predicing, but I don't understand why its an issue only when inside a material builder…

2. using megascans, I'm trying to setup the shader manually(quixel triplaner, couldn't get Bridge to work), what are the maps needed for export usually? albedo, roughness, specular, displacement and normal?
whats the difference between normal and normalbump?

3. going inside the quixel triplaner, I can see all maps are fed through a gamma adjustment(down to 0.454), is this something I should be doing with mantra in general?(when working with gamma 2.2)

4. for normals to work I should pipe the normal texture through a displace along normal, I thought this was also needed for geo displacements using the displace node, but just using the texture as is seems to work?

5. to adjust the strength of certain maps I can use a multiply constant node? I find it strange that all these parameters aren't built into the quixel main node…

Sorry for the long post, hopefully I can get some answers to ease my mind, overall its looking good but would like to know I'm not missing anything important,
Thanks!

Hi everyone!
I'm having some problems getting impact points between non simulated geometry, any ideas what's the best way to go about it?
Right now I have a system the kind of works, but it's not an elegant solution and won't work 100% of cases…
using intersect analysis I can get a point at the impact location, but I need it to “live” only for 1 frame, any suggestions on how to do this?
Perhaps a timer that checks new points entering a group, and deleting them when the time is larger than 1 frame?
Not sure exactly how to go about it, any help is much appreciated!
Thanks!

Hey,
I think I've encountered a bug? animating the wind tunnel strength on a smoke object doesn't seem to be working… any ideas for a workaround to this?

hmm did anyone take a look at the scene file…?

Hi everyone
having some problems with the new pyro coloring workflow
I'm getting some strange color specs at the beginning of the sim, any idea why this is happening? I've set up a very simple scene using the shelf tools
it also shows up when rendering so its not a viewport thing…
would love to know why this is happening and how to fix it



https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1X2dc5b9UpTtx7QCkO3AcM0JSkxgtlr9-?usp=sharing [drive.google.com]

Some more questions, probably better to keep in all in here rather than opening a new topic

Found the wind tunnel, it produces very nice results

Is there no way to have fuel burn rate go higher than 1? from my understanding this “1” represents 1 second, what if I want my fuel to burn faster than 24 frames(for example)

When working on a Houdini scene with many different sims in it, do you usually prefer to split the hip files to a few smaller ones each for a specific element? or have it all in 1 big file? how does this affect the performance of Houdini?

Is there a way to source a few colors into smoke at the beginning of a sim? and how do I export this color to be used in a renderer such as Arnold

I understand, I guess I always only needed to convert the packed geo to polys so I didn't notice the difference…

what is the wind tunnel? never saw any information/tutorial about this

Hi everyone!
I have a few questions regarding different methods of doing things in pyro, and I'm not sure whats the “best” way to go about them…

first, is there a real difference between unpack and convert nodes? they seem to do the same thing, is there a preference to using one over the other?

when adding wind to pyro, its possible to do this in a few ways, all generating different results:
there is the gas wind node, pop force and pop wind, custom velocity fields, and a gas field wrangle? what do you prefer to use? and what gives a more natural movement?

for collision interactions, do you usually use “extrapolate into collisions” and “correct collisions” off? or is it more a matter of the type of look your after?

would be great to iron out these questions, as they were nagging me for a while now

Try this, I'm pretty new to houdini but this has worked for me a few times

Thanks for the replay!
What I was experiencing was actually volume gain in FLIP, but lowering the grid scale to 1 solved the problem…

Does a lower grid scale number make the simulation more accurate? is it slower to calculate? Never had to change the default settings so far, but it seems like its a must for smaller scale simulations

Hi everyone! first post here

I've been using the flip solver for a while now but only now I noticed something strange…
On a recent shot I was working on I have a character moving liquid inside a flask, the movement itself is pretty fast and jerky, so I needed to use a pretty high substeps count to make sure the liquid doesn't leak

The strange thing is, it looked like by the end of the animation there were significantly less fluid inside the flask than at the start…
I tried to recreate something similar to upload here, but now the opposite is happening, at the end of the simulation there is more volume to the liquid than the start

Can someone maybe have a look at the scene file? maybe I'm missing something here