I'm following this tutorial:

Thing is, I get to the point in the video at the timestamp (28:33), where he says the big moment has arrived and he hits play. I hit play and nothing happens.

I've been over the Point Wrangle nodes to make sure they're identical, I've scaled my points up and down in case they were too far apart for the algorithm, I've tried tweaking the radii in the algorithm, and nothing.

I feel like I'm missing something super simple, but I don't know how to diagnose it.

I've uploaded the file I'm working from.

EDIT: I've now actually uploaded the file. I hit submit and had to wait for the post to be approved before I could correct it.

You need to change the attractor and node group nodes from “Primitive” to “Point” then the solver will work. Your difficulty here is the reason why I now will no longer buy Houdini training that does not include the .hip file, nor will attempt to rebuild .hip files for free tutorials (rather I will just sit back and watch!).

Houdini is a programming language it is very tedious and error prone to re write the program yourself as you listen and watch a video. If things go wrong you have to keep re-watching till you find what you missed. I checked the tutorial, and he does very clearly say change group type from prim to point in both cases - but it is so each to miss these key steps when you are listening / watching / build an node tree in another window!

Of course the fact that Houdini is a programming language means when tutorial authors give you the .hip file you can read the code and concentrate on understanding the algorithm rather than rebuilding. For me that is now the benchmark for handing over money - give me the .hip file!

It worked! Thanks for that, I appreciate the effort. Now it's doing something I can start to work with it.