I second this. Masking smoothing, masking erodes, masking dilates... just brilliant.

Kijas
Thank you so much!!!!

This is from years ago but it still works. I was having lots of flickering around the edges of my surface and using this method helped I was trying to use the Particle Fluid Surface Mask out of the box and was useless Thanks!

Oh, okay, a Drag Force DOP slows things down. I just needed to learn where in the network to place it.

I think this might be a hallelujah moment–remember those?

Drag force, though…it'll reduce the effect of gravity, no? Effectively making the fluid fall more slowly?

Regarding the Swirly Kernel, coincidentally, last night I ran across this:

https://vimeo.com/159438315 [vimeo.com]

As the description notes, and probably everyone knows but me, is that this method is built into Houdini 15 as…the Swirly Kernel.

So that solves the noise, but not the initial velocity. Being a noob is so painful…half the time you want to solve things, half the time you want to let it go and hope you bump into the answer later.

CircusMonkey, what is making the fluid stick to the collision object?? It's like a different answer to the ‘honey dripping from the bottom of the ball’ viscosity question I've seen around this forum.

Actually it's built to my intended real-world scale in meters, around 60m across.

This is a simplified R&D on a concept I'll flesh out if the sim works properly.

This is a pretty basic question, I know. General answers would be just fine. I wouldn't bump, but I imagine others might benefit from some insight (unless it's so glaringly obvious that I'm just being obtuse).

What I have:
A simple setup, most FLIP settings at default. The fluid comes down like a raging rapid, angry water, agitated water, water out for revenge.

What I want:
Fluid coming down with less velocity, less turbulence–calming, rather like you're at a relaxing day spa…mmm…patchouli…

Does this mean I'd want sheet-like behavior, the crown solver, which is a bigger subject? I hope not.

What I've tried:
Velocity smoothing.
Velocity scale.
Spatial Scale. (This worked to a degree, but I'm loath to use it. My scene is scaled to real-world dimensions).

This would seem to be a fundamental request, which means I'm probably not finding answers because I'm using the wrong terms. Wrangle / VEX solutions are a bit beyond my scope at present. I think this is more about generalities and base settings.

Thanks Tomas, you sent me down the right path. I used attribute transfer.

Ugly is okay! I've tested the Alembic output, and in Cinema 4D I can convert the face sets into vertex maps and smooth them there.

I might have answered this question if I knew the terminology. But I'm a month into learning, so I'm not sure of the language. What I'm asking breaks down in to three questions:

1) What does Houdini call polygon groups used for texturing, which in Cinema 4D we call ‘polygon selection sets’? Yes, I've actually looked around for this.

2) The intent of this, in my case, is to export a model from Houdini to render in Cinema 4D, with parts of the model able to be textured differently. I've searched, maybe not well enough. Can I preserve groups using any export methods (obj / fbx / alembic)?

3) Now here's the toughie. In the attached file I've copied some boxes onto a sphere, and then I've meshed it with VDBs. Is it possible to determine which areas the cubes are influencing, so that I can apply different materials to those places? And then export those?

I'm trying for a 3-fer on my very first question post, haha! Thanks in advance.

I'm learning as well. Of the miniscule number of things I know, this happens to be one. Run through this tutorial:

https://vimeo.com/152083535 [vimeo.com]

For fluids, there's a bubble advection tutorial on Vimeo as well:

https://vimeo.com/153856342 [vimeo.com]