I am a new user to Houdini and am quite pleased with it so far. My question is whether there is a way to export the “Streamer” lines in the Velocity section of a Volume. Would it be better to advect particles and then trace them some how? I am totally new to this software, so any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

the documentation covers this:

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini11.0/dynamics/io [sidefx.com]

Thank you for the reply. I have read this portion of the documentation, but unfortunately I am not having any luck with actually grabbing the Streamers as a geometry type. I would like to use the vectors which are visualized in the Streamer view to construct line segments. These would then be used to extrude a circle.
Does anyone know of a tutorial that might point me in the right direction? It is too bad that the Houdini documentation doesn't include any examples of how to utilize the various nodes.
Again, any assistance is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

There is a video tutorial that covers this , In the tutorials section of this site.

rob

Here ya go!

Circus Monkey- Thank you for your reply regarding the video tutorial. I would love to know which one actually covers the workflow. I have viewed the tutorials in the dynamics section but did not come across the information in any of them . A link would be great.

tjeeds- I really appreciate you taking the time to put this file together for me. Do you happen to have a link to more information regarding this workflow? It seems that your setup is doing exactly what I would like to do. I am just having a little trouble understanding some of the steps in the geo1 node concerning the ForEach. Thanks again for your assistance. Very helpful!

Oh yeah, I put this together a few months ago and forgot there was a forEach in there.

Keep in mind, if you only need one layer this complex schnitzel it totally unnescessary, it's only to get the streamers to fill the box. If you set up smoke sim from the shelf you can just use a dop import to bring in vel/Visualization and you're done.

ForEach SOPs are sort of confusing at first but all it's doing is looping through all of the pieces of visualisation data on the smoke sim and merging it together. Inside the forEach there's a dopimport pointing to the smoke sim, the Geometry parameter is set to:

Uh oh, lost the end of my post there, um, basically there is some rigamaroll going on inside the smoke object in dops (follow the red nodes, reindeer) which facilitates the creation of multiple pieces of vis data, usually an object has only one. This is how the streamer slices are spread through the whole box and why a forEach works well to pull them to SOPs in one swell foop.

Hope that helps, it definitely is confussin'