Christoph Fasching

Hi everyone,

I'm wondering what the standard workflow is for handling whitewater displacement when combining a flip tank simulation with a procedural ocean setup.

My setup is:

I have an Ocean Spectrum and Ocean Evaluate setup.
The center region is a FLIP Tank simulation, initialized from the ocean spectrum/ocean surface.
An object interacts with the water inside the tank.
At render time I'm using the Houdini Ocean Procedural with a mask:
FLIP simulation in the center.
Procedural ocean generated from the spectrum outside the sim region.
The ocean extension works correctly and the render looks good.

My issue is with the whitewater.

The Whitewater Solver generates particles from the FLIP sim and everything looks correct inside the simulation domain. However, when the surface gets displaced at render time by the ocean spectrum/procedural, the whitewater remains in its original positions and no longer matches the displaced water surface, especially near the transition between the sim area and the extended ocean.

It seems like the whitewater would also need to receive the same ocean displacement (respecting the mask) so that it stays aligned with the rendered water surface.

What is the typical production workflow for this?

Do people displace the whitewater particles at render time using the same ocean spectrum?
Is there a standard SOP setup to apply the ocean displacement to the whitewater points?
How do you handle the masking/blending between the simulated region and the procedural ocean region?
Is there a recommended workflow from SideFX for this common FLIP + extended ocean setup?

This feels like a fairly common use case, so I'm curious how others solve it.

Thanks!

The main limitations are the Indie revenue cap , the use of .hiplc limited commercial file formats, and the fact that Indie assets can't be mixed into a commercial Houdini pipeline.

The finished film can be freely distributed, and you can opensource the project files, assets, and tools.

Contributors would just need a compatible Houdini license to work with the source files.

Terence Ziegler
Would a MacBook M5 Pro Max be able to run Copernicus?

Since Houdini 21, yes.
Copernicus runs fine on Apple Silicon Macs.

Earlier builds had some macOS specific issues. Mainly preview material & refresh. But those are mostly resolved now.
There’s no general OptiX dependency in Copernicus.
The main exception is AI denoising with OptiX which is NVIDIA only. On a Mac we just use OIDN instead and it works just fine (I use it in Karma as well).