Hi!

I've scattered many “flakes” on an animated alembic dress. Since I'm using the @P to drive the placements (something that changes during the animation of the dress falling to the floor) I've transferred it to @mypos in a way that it doesn't change over time.

My problem is, houdini re-calculates the scatter at each frame. At frame one, I have 20151 points and at the end I have 20075 points. I basically get new flakes at each frame instead of just keeping the ones generated at frame one

What would be the right way to scatter those rivets and have them stay on the cloth for the whole animation?

-Olivier

FOUND A SOLUTION!

First off, after doing the scatter of points on the dress, I use a “file cache” to export the result of frame 1 externally and browse it with a “file” node. That fixed the problem of the scatter node refreshing at each frame and giving a different amount of points each time.

Then, I used a "latice“ node set to ”points":

-input 1 -> scattered points
-input 2 -> the dress without any animation (I used timewarp)
-input 3 -> the animation of the dress

Now, my points simply moved with the dress. I finished with a ray sop that transfers the normals from the polygonal dress to the points at each frame so the flakes' orientation would match the dress at all times.

-Olivier