Hey there,

I'm a total newbie with Houdini Apprentice and I'm looking for the simplest way to “loop” a pyro animation (make frame 0 match the last frame without any visible transition). I'm sure this question has been asked a million times but I just can't seem to find the right post (probably because I don't know many of the terms people use).

I have searched for a tutorial online, but can't seem to find anything directly related. If anyone could so much as direct me to a post on looping animation in general, it would be much appreciated.

https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=27476 [sidefx.com]

The method described in the tutorial works for the viewport for me, however, when I try to render the frames I looped, renderer seems to read files from cache folder disregarding ones in the scene that are looped. How do I feed the loop to the renderer?

Ok, after few hours of derping I realised that I should check out the “blend shapes” node with the blueish part that makes it to be drawn in viewport. However, I'm getting a jump on the last frame… I even downloaded the project of the guy who made the tutorial video and inserted my simulation in his nodes, and it had a jump… I hoped it'd blend up to be looped, but apparently there are other things that can affect loopability of your flames…

UPD: next day I realised that I got the jump from the “Blend Shapes” node, adter setting blend = 1 - it started to displace my simulation, even though the “blend position” was turned off.


UPD2: Ok, I think I figured that out. What was making the fittering was the dynamic boundries, and when the node was trying to blend them - they blended into some crappy displacement of simulation. To fix this I had to check “enforce boudries” in “resize_container” node in pyro_sim. After playing around a bit with the container, I managed to blend the shapes.