I am working on a sim where it involves particles spraying out of a House. I'm applying what i learned in Maya in learning Pops more. In Maya, one of the particle emitter’s parameters was “spread” that worked like the cone angle for a spotlight and spread out the particles as such. I tried some things in Houdini with no success, so I’m wondering what are some things I can do to get that basic cone-like, spread/spray effect?

Here is a simple example similar to Maya's point particle with a spread. It uses a location pop with a velocity variance to establish the cone…that said not sure if that will work for what you are describing. If you want to use a geometry source instead of a single point in space you will have to decide how you want those particles to emit and provide the appropriate source. Often times a pointSop or pointWrangle is used on the geo to define a normal and velocity vector. It is pretty easy to manipulate these point vectors to do what you want with vops as well.