Hey ya'll I need some help! I'm working on creating some stylized FX in Houdini with hand painted textures and was wondering if there was an easy way to "erode" an alpha channel. I've accomplished this with using points in Houdini but the result is too pixelated unless I increase the objects res.
I've also tried using cops to accomplish this but found it to be too computation heavy since I plan to apply the erode to multiple textures at the same time. Any ideas on how to do this would be super super appreciated.

- Current Houdini: https://gyazo.com/055c2356e18fa2c23272079f9dd8f7da [gyazo.com]

- Goal to use textures + alpha erosion driven by particle age like in unreal: https://gyazo.com/f3a5fc855500d4530876bbbd79b77343 [gyazo.com]

- Shared my hip in case it can help with ideasYour text to link here... [drive.google.com]

Hi,

You can implement it as a volume operation using volume convolution:





The above convolution kernel dilates the voxels so you take the difference between this and the original volume, then subtract this from the original volume. You can also volume blur the difference volume before subtraction if you want smoother result.

If you want max performance, consider implementing it in OpenCL which could reach/surpass real-time speeds depending on your GPU.