Hey all,
I am having a hard time trying to find how to parent the actual position of a pop fluid emitter to the head of an animated FBX so that the position of the emitter (which would be blood spray) stays in place relative to the head as it moves.

I have tried a few things with no success and I find it hard to search for it, I am guessing it is because the actual process of accomplishing this would use different terms than usual to achieve the outcome, such as, with Unity I would just make the emitter a child object to the head bone of the character and position/rotate it appropriately to emit in the desired direction.

I keep trying to search for things like “parent emitter to animation”, “copy particle position from animation”, or simply “parent emitter to geometry” but I am not finding anything helpful.

What I have tried myself within Houdini was take my main geometry root for my blood, then add a null at the end and called it “BLOOD_01_OUT”. Then I made a new top-level geo next to it and called it blood_anim_merge, in there I create two object merge nodes, one of them, I selected the output I made for the blood, and then that shows up, then in the second I added the head bone of the animation, which I can also see, and I see it move as I move the animation timeline, so with both of those in the geo, I tried things like creating an attribute wrangle on both, and on the head bone I put in v@hp = @P; (hp meaning head point), then v@bp = @P; (blood point), then merging the two and doing another attrib wrangle after the merge and settings @bp = @hp; hoping it would make the position of the blood be equal to the position of the head, but that didn't work.

Does anyone happen to have or know of an example I can look at, or an appropriate tutorial I might be able to watch to accomplish this? Even filling me in on the terms I should be using to search for a solution would be helpful, as I am guessing I am just not looking for the right thing.

Thanks!
-ID

I was sort of able to get it worked out, but the way I was doing it was not within the dop network, so the simulation was not able to interact with the animated character, so I tried to look that up and it looks like within the dop network I was supposed to use a staticobject to bring in the FBX animation, but that doesn't seem to be working.

The post I saw said you need to have SOP path and OBJ paths set, which I did, but I am not sure I am doing it right, or if I am missing something?

Here is what it looks like. https://i.imgur.com/yMDGfer.png [i.imgur.com]

I just used the File menu import for FBX and left things default so it created a new geo node for the FBX. If I am in the top level /obj and I scrub the timeline with the imported fbx's geo node flagged for viewing, the animation plays, so it seems the import is ok, but bringing the imported file/animation into the dop network isn't liking the way I am going about it.

Is there some additional step I am missing, or some other way I need to set the paths of the staticobject?

*** Edit - It looks like instead of selecting the top GEO node that connects to all of the skinned mesh parts as seen below as the SOP path, if I select just one of them, such as the head, or chest, that shows up just fine. How can I get all of them to show up at once?