Jeff Budsberg

Hi all,
Sorry for the late reply! This post slipped past me.

I typically update the example file prior to the OpenVDB Course at Siggraph and will likely do so again this year. Are there topics that you would like me to cover or tools/features that need examples?

Just opened the file with Houdini 20.5 with OpenVDB 11; on quick inspection the examples work as expected, but let me know if anything is broken or needs clarification.

best,
Jeff

hey all, do adhoc groups not work with vertex attributes? (see attached image) or am I missing something? thanks!

I dug up my slides from when we implemented [dl.acm.org] vdbToSpheres to help explain what's going on. Here's one way to think about it:
* for all of the points inside a level set, choose the one furthest from the surface.
* That point is the center of a sphere, with radius equal to that distance (or optionally clamp the max sphere size).
* remove all other points that exist inside that sphere
* update the distances to all remaining points
* repeat (until desired number of spheres, reach a size threshold, etc)



If you change the levelset, the distribution of possible points would change. Since your base object is changing over the animation, the level set would change, hence the spheres change during animation.

In practice in production, artists often run vdbToSpheres on a reference frame (eg. first frame of the animation), then wrap deform the spheres to the animated/deforming mesh. The result is a temporally-coherent number & location of spheres.