Hello!

I'm a total newbie to Houdini, my background is design, live-action directing, but I'm really wanting to learn Houdini and hopefully implement it in my work.

This is the effect I'm wanting to achieve, only take out the character, the footsteps appear by themselves but with the same displacement, snow clumping effect etc: https://youtu.be/9H1gRQ6S7gg?t=3m30s [youtu.be]

I've been messing around with wet grains, using various pieces of geometry to displace them but I'm not really achieving the results like in this video.

Also, I'm not sure if wet grains is the best way to go about it, perhaps animating a displacement map would be better, then using grains to add to the effect.

This will also end up being composited into live-action footage so I'm not sure if that changes what I would use in Houdini to simulate the effect.

Thanks for reading and for any help! Any advice is absolutely welcome!

Go to Google and type houdini footsteps

http://cgterminal.com/2012/04/13/houdini-creating-footprints-in-snow-with-geometry-solver-tutorial/ [cgterminal.com]