Jeff Aberle2 One thing I'm confused on is the same shader gets applied to bubbles, spray and foam if I try to shade the particles in the same Houdini file as the simulation. Is that also part of my problem? Or are they shaded differently somehow and I'm not seeing how?
I guess what I mean is. Aren't the bubbles, spray and foam all going to have the same shader which would make foam appear within the water as well as outside the water?
One thing I'm confused on is the same shader gets applied to bubbles, spray and foam if I try to shade the particles in the same Houdini file as the simulation. Is that also part of my problem? Or are they shaded differently somehow and I'm not seeing how?
Haven't heard from anyone on this topic. Are there tutorials that cover this subject in depth. I've been through the cmivfx tutorials, but the volume method of particles isn't discussed there. I see tutorials on fluids and I see beautiful renders and the authors make it seem like they just hit the render button to get the great looks. I'm missing something critical here.
Can a person hire people to make tutorials on specific subjects? Where would I find someone? Something simple starting with a Flip tank and taking it through to getting nice clear water with foam/bubbles/spray and ocean water with foam/bubbles and spray.
Having trouble with foam renderings. Starting with the shelf tools and either getting whitewater by default or by adding it afterwards produces foam as a dark cloud instead of anything that resembles foam. I try modifying the colors and that doesn't change anything either. I'm sure I'm missing something simple. Any suggestions?
I have a nice environment light and the water looks good, but the grey cloud does not. It looks like the foam is being created from particles using a VDB node to create a volume. I've heard there are three ways to create foam. One using particles and rendering the particles. Another using volumes like I think I'm trying to do by default. And another using particle normals or something.
Ooops. I just realized I'm not seeing the whitewater particles, I'm seeing the imported geometry just as expected, but the particles are black instead of blue. Since the foam and spray were all black particles I got confused.
At the same time, my loaded particles are showing in black which is ok. But I also see the simulated particles from the DOP network and this acts as I said before. Meaning that when I'm in the splashtank_fluid, I can see my loaded particles and scrub the timeline and their they are in real time and as black particles. But I also see the blue particles from whatever frame was last calculated when I started at frame one and scrubbed forward. Once I go back on the timeline, this last calculated frame of blue particles just stays there with the loaded particles only moving as I scrub the timeline. Unless I go back to frame 1 and only scrub forward, then the calculated points in blue and the loaded points in black line up perfectly.
Also when I go back to the obj level, the loaded points don't show up. Ooops, I just figured out I had to set the display node in the DOP I/O node to display the points outside at the obj level. Now it's working well.
I'm leaving these two posts of problems in case others run into the same situations as I did. I'm slowly learning.
Ah thanks. That makes more sense. (SIDE NOTE—The next two posts are problems I ran into but figured out as I played around) No help is needed for this post and the next. I'm leaving it here so others can be helped.
So I rendered out 20 frames to see if they would import and it doesn't seem to import. I see the .bgeo.sc files and the I didn't change the path at all. I turned off caching in the splashtank_sim and whitewater_sim, but the fluid doesn't seem to import. I have to scrub the timeline back to frame 1 and proceed forward for it to calculate, but if I scrub backwards even a frame, all the progress is lost which makes me realize the file loading isn't working.
What's also odd is that I have the display flags turned off on all my whitewater nodes (whitewater_source, whitewater_sim and whitewater_import). The whitewater doesn't show up when I'm at the obj level but when I dive into the splashtank_fluid, then the whitewater particles show up. Maybe this is normal, but I have the caching turned off for the whitewater_sim and I've disabled the foam, spray and bubbles in the whitewater_sim node–>whitewatersolver1.
I'm using a splashtank for testing out exporting. In the DOP I/O node at the top of the list in the splashtank_fluid node I render out the fluid (not bubbles,foam or spray), then after it's rendered select the checkbox “Load from Disk”.
This should use the cached files from that point on yet still retain all the information that the whitewater simulation nodes need, correct? It should also free up a lot of RAM to do the whitewater simulation. But how do I clear the RAM caching of my fluid or do I even have to?
Then in the whitewater_source node, there's a whitewatersource_cache node to export whatever particles I have enabled (foam, spray, bubbles) in the whitewatersolver1 node. This way I keep everything separate.
Then in a new Houdini file, I use a geometry node and the file node inside that to load the .bgeo.sc files back in and use a merge node to collect all four different types of particle. Then use the VDB tools described in the Hallway tutorials to build the meshes. Or use separate VDB tools to create one mesh for the fluid, another for the foam, another for the bubbles and I think spray is left as particles.
Is this the typical workflow?
Why does Houdini 14 default to .bgeo.sc instead of .bgeo ? What's the difference anyway?
I watched his tutorials, but don't recall him separating them out like that. I'll take a look again as I haven't watched that in a while.
It sounds like I can save the point data to bgeo's for the water. Then import the water sim and do the foam/bubbles. Then the spray. I would do this with the DOP I/O node that's already created when I make a Flip Tank of any kind. Sound correct?
I have a Flip simulation with foam/spray/bubbles. The original Flip simulation is 800,000 particles and works, but takes about 10GBytes of my computers 12GBytes of memory while it's computing. This is without foam/spray/bubbles. Now if I add these components the memory runs out and Houdini gives me grief…Unresponsive.
I have a poor graphics card. GeForce GTX 750, but I would like to get something like a Quadro 6000 or Quadro K4000 if it will help me with my simulations. I need a larger ocean and I'll easily run out of memory even without foam/spray/bubbles.
My questions are: (1) Will a better graphics card help me with my CPU memory problem or do I simply need more CPU RAM for my computer? (2) Are these cards overkill for Houdini? My goals are to have larger and faster simulations plus faster render times. (3) Also, if I render out each frame to a bgeo file, will this solve my memory issue? It seems like it would speed up the computations of the foam/spray/bubbles if I pre-render the water to a file. But for each frame, my computer still has to deal with 800,000 points of water which eat up memory.