TheDunadan

How about offsetting all values by something large such as ‘1000’ for all velocities and rendering in floating point precision. This would avoid the trouble of needing the 0 to 1 range, add higher precision… would take a bit more disc space etc., but would be simplest way I guess.

Jens

The surface flow effect in Maya is a premade script by alias that effectively uses a nurbs surface with it's uv-coordinates to control the particle flow.

In Houdini we have the Creep POP for this and it's luckily pretty much more dynamic. Furthermore we can do as well particle sliding as behaviour on a collision event .. for this check the first tuorial here to get you started http://sidefx.vislab.usyd.edu.au/houdini_video/by_topic/effects/index.html [sidefx.vislab.usyd.edu.au]

Jens

That's a shame things didn't go better for you. I'm trying to convice a studio full of maya artists as well to give Houdini a fair chance, but haven't suceeded either yet, but I have no intention of giving up either yet.

I guess the reason so many people don't ‘like’ Houdini is people are simply boring and sooo conservative at heart. They like to do things the way they are used to and too many changes scares them. They somewhat enjoy having found some possibly akward workaround for problem X and they know everytime someone runs into it, they'll solve it. I think the work someone has put into a scene is in Houdini more transparent then with any other software I know.
And I agree with all of you, there is no need to be a mathematicans, coder or whatever in Houdini to make very complex things that always need heavy coding / scripting in other software, BUT you have to understand the principles of 3d and understand what you are doing.
In my experience there is a great deal of 3d artists that learned how to solve a problem / create something by executing some commands in a very specific order, but they don't understand why or how it works. They eventually improve their solutions by making little variations here and there, but it's often more trial & error then anything else. For all those kinda 3d artists Houdini is the scarriest thing on earth. Besides things such as coding and math quickily become a routine kinda work if you often have to deal with those things (once you have figured out how you want to solve the problem). I'm attending a course on AI in Design and it seems that often it's the users that stop the progress then the actual technology. By the way, look at the most popular new 3d programs / renderers, they usually have one thing in common, they are very intuitive and allow you to use it without too much thinking. People are quite happy if the program is static and they much rather feel like crying for a new feature or plugin if they run into a problem there is no premade tool for it.

Anyhow, I might be exaggerating a bit, I guess you see my point and it's rather sad, things are that way

Jens