Just a little project i've been working on for fun and learning…

video [forums.odforce.net]

I know most of you read both odForce and sidefx forums but i just thought i'd share my project here as well for those who are not familiar with odForce!

You can find more details here [forums.odforce.net]

Please feel free to ask questions, post comments, and offer suggestions!

Cheers,
Jonathan

This is an amazing effect, love the particle movement. Rendering is beautiful.

The only slight problem i can see with it is the highlight on the can near the top isn't transfered to the particles at the start, but it is very unnoticeable, took a few viewings to notice. Otherwise perfect.

How long did this take you to create?

Also im relatively new to Houdini and have been wanting to create a similar effect, could you post a brief overview/ tutorial on how to create the basic effect?

Thanks

hello,

thanks. the effect didn't take long at all to get the overall basic effect look. Probably only a few hours. However, it quickly turned into a much larger project when I used it to learn more aspects in houdini.

For example, originally i just wanted to learn more about the “delayed load shader” and see how far I could push it. Eventually, once I got the hang of that, the dynamics could use tweaking, and so I learned more about advecting particles with a fluid simulation. Currently, i'm working on getting the paint to actually bump up, crack, and peel off, fly away and then disintegrate. The can will also have little pieces crumble off of it and either fall to the ground or fly away with the rest of the effect.

As for the “how to's” , if you have not already done so, please refer to the link i provided in my first post. Some of it's a bit long winded, but I documented every part of my journey and provide almost all of the links to other pieces of information that were used to learn how to accomplish this.

As a brief overview though, basically, i generated a matte that would drive the emission of the particles… it also drives the emission of the fluid…. ALSO, a more basic version of that matte was used to fade off the can.

You can accomplish that in many ways, the basic approach is giving the main model an all black 0,0,0 color… then coloring the points with white by some any number of methods, *grouping by an animated bounding object* then coloring those points white… attributeTransfer an ALL white object, to the black colored model… or even using an animated texture map that you create by scratch… and even, procedural textures applied using vopsops.

Then when you have that matte, you can use this to “emit” particles in the areas that are WHITE. also, you can use this to copy metaballs to, and use that as a source for a fluid sim. Then when you have the fluid sim looking good, you can then do an ADVECT BY VOLUMES on your particles, which will then apply the velocities from the fluid simulation to your particle sim! Then to speed up rendering/simulation… I used a wedge rop, and did multiple SMALL simulations *small particle counts*, but with a different seed, so that they all have the same dynamics but don't have to calculate so much information all at once… sim those to disk, then bring them each back in with a delayed load shader. this will help you render out the particles a lot faster… however, it has some limitations. example, if you want to make some tweaks to say you're particle scale, you wouldn't be able to really use the delayed load in that event, but instead would have to just read in the particle caches, merge them in one sop net, and then make a change to your pscale… so try to get all the “basic looks” figured out first before beginning the delayed load part of it.

As for the paint peeling, i'm still working on this right now!
So keep an eye out on my other posted topic, where i will be for sure updating more of my findings there.

Jonathan