jonnymorris8

Hello All,

In a bid to further my knowledge of the capabilities of H9, I have started going through the video tutorials available on this site. One of the recent ones I went through was ‘creating a simple gas solver’.

Whereas I followed along with this tutorial with no problems and understood what was going on with most of it, some aspects of it confused me a little. I don't wish to criticize the tutorial as I learned a lot about getting vector fields into DOP's for the use of manipulating and acting upon other geometry, but I was confused at what the introduction of the scalar field did to the simulation.

I understand that it was introduced to ‘calm down the movement of the vector field’ but I don't really understand how it had this effect. I know a scalar is sort of like a multiplier, so I mean, was it introduced to add the control of being able to multiply up and down the resultant vector values from the vector field? For example if at one voxel the sampled vector returned 40,45,76.43, is the scaler field multiplying that down to a vector of a smaller magnitude to ‘calm down’ its effect?

It would be nice if someone could explain exactly what the scaler field is doing.

Many thanks!

Thanks man, I remember reading about .rat…

My shadow map is still stepping, I thought this was why my shadow in my image had noise in it but I'm not sure. Is it right that ‘Z depth samples’ is only used by Renderman?

If rendering in mantra, what are the most important setting for high quality shadows if z depth samples is only for Rednerman?

Thanks for the tips.

I am new to Houdini and I am experimenting with the lighting. It seems quite complex, with many things quite apparent in other packages being present but buried quite deep.

At the moment I am experimenting with shadow maps. I have managed to get a shadow map written out for a test scene but I am unsure of some things.

1. What image format should I use for my shadow maps? Will any do or is there a special format? I have been using tif.

2. Please see my attached shadow map. Can anyone tell me how I can improve the quality with regards to the stepping in the shadow map? I have tried upping the shadow map res and increasing depth map samples but they are still present.

Thanks.