Hi! I'm currently a Houdini student and my current project requires me to do water sim (rain on a pond). This involves splashes & ripples from the rain, and a small stream of water moving across the pond. My sim looks ok. But my render looks like pooh.

So far I've:

- Transferred the attributes from the particles falling to my grid (created color to visualize the transfer)

- My splash is a separate system, used scatter points, had the normals point up and velocity follow the normals using point sop. Then have particles shoot out using popnet, assigned a particle fluid surface and cached it out. Then the cached ‘splash’ is assigned to points on the grid from the rain drops.

- Ripples, using a ripple solver triggered by the raining particles…a bit unstable after 150 frames…the grid gets destroyed somehow.

- I created an ambient noise on the grid using vopsop.

- I have not done any fluid sim, which concerns me a little because my project is suppose to be an Environmental FX sim. At this point I have to do this in SOPS, and material noise. But my teacher is giving me the option to change it to fluid sim if I choose to.

-On rendering, currently trying the DT tutorial on fluid but it's very basic.

I need help on:
- How to render water properly, I know houdini comes with a basicFluid material. I can't seem to find an in-depth tutorial anywhere how to render water. Like reflections, specular, refractions, and environment map.

- Recommendation of whats the better system to use. SOPS or fluids.

My reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BWiVDl4DyM [youtube.com] but imagine there's a small stream of water travelling from left to right. And more of a mid shot than a wide shot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVXnoIoWu88 [youtube.com] stream of water example.
Sorry for the looong message… I only have 2 weeks to do this so I am emailing whoever I can to get help. My teacher wants us to do the research. Any info will be greatly appreciated.


Cheers,
Rod