Anyone who has had success with the Edit with Physics feature and Drop LOP node in Solaris, would love to hear what we did to make those tools useable. I decomposed geometry to make proper convex hulls for concave geo, results were total garbage for collisions.

1. How and what type of prims (Xforms, components, mesh, etc.) should collision geometry get authored on to make it usable?

2. The active dynamic objects seem quite erratic as I move them around and get very confused when they collide with other geometry; what am I doing wrong?


Any advice is most welcome.

Hello,

I hate to say this, but lops seems to continually disappoint me. The drop lop doesn't seem to work with small items. For example, I used the stack layout brush to stack playing blocks. Each block is around 8 cm, so it is pretty small. If I used the drop lop all the pieces go flying around erratically. But if I go back to the layout lop and change the scale of the pieces to be 5x bigger, then replace the items and use the drop lop, it works perfectly fine. I also noticed that at the original scale if I unlock the drop lop and create my own RBD solver it actually works fine at that scale.

Pretty much all these fancy features like the drop lop or layout brush all sort of work but are way too buggy to actually use. Always hitting some strange issue.

I forgot to add, in the layout lop I set the type to reference (instead of point instance). If you don't change that it doesn't work properly in the drop lop.

I definitely feel like sideFX have been dropping the ball lately on stability and performance. As a freelancer, it’s quite frustrating that I waste so much time debugging simple things! Starting to feel more like a software engineer than an artist. I know it’s a part of being a 3D artist but the honest truth is houdini might be the best DCC in terms of its architecture and tools, but they rarely work as advertised. Solaris, KineFx, Karma are all great fantastic ideas, but feel like tacked on plugins ATM.