KaiStavginski
No problem - here's that rubbertoy scene.

I disabled some file caches to makes sure there are no external dependencies.

You should run the two File Cache SOPs in /obj/blob_geo/sim. These are for the FEM simulation and for generating the deforming collision VDB.

moogtastic
I would experiment layering Worley cellular noise multiplied to the density of a spherical volume, use that density as input to a fire intensity field in a Pyro shader and play with the ramp values. Looks like there's some nice depth based color effects, maybe use the gradient of a VDB volume as a way to modify color and intensity inside the volume

Jonathan Moore2
I don't have time to create an example for you but if you follow this tutorial on wedging pyro sims the methodology is exactly the same for particles. The wedging stuff kicks in around the 16 minute mark. It's simply a matter of referencing back into your particle network from your Wedge node and referencing the seed on the emitter. If you've set up the wedge correctly it will automatically cache out the number of cache wedges you require whilst ensuring the seed is changed on each cache wedge. A Wedge isn't a special type of cache is simply Houdini nomenclature for the process in much the same way that Thinkbox refer to cache iterations as Partitions.

Jonathan Moore2
Having researched HEngine: Point Generation a little more it seems it's main benefit is that you can use Houdini Engine licenses on Mantra network nodes. I've personally never liked render time point generation multipliers and I've tried them in XSI ICE, Krakatoa and Houdini. Partitioning/Wedging always produces more natural results. Splitting your cache files into manageable chunks aids data IO too.

symek
Modern version of point replicate procedural is HEngine: Point Generation

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/vop/enginepointgen [www.sidefx.com]

rvinluan
Oh I see. Strange that the installer doesn't recognize those symlink options. They were definitely added in Houdini 16.0.

How about trying this workaround instead:
- Run the Houdini installer and install Houdini to a local directory on the Linux machine.
- Then from a terminal, copy the local Houdini distro to the Windows shared folder in a way where symbolic links are resolved and not preserved. I think passing the -RLflags to the copy command would do the trick. For example, cp -RL /path/to/local/hfs16.0.ZZZ /path/to/windows/shared/folder/hfs16.0.ZZZ