Houdini Render #1 - Particles?!?

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This marks the beginning of my houdini diary. I want to record my progress from novice to pro as I learn more about 3D and houdini as a program. This is number #1. So I'm about 5 weeks into my FX Foundations course over at CGSpectrum. So technically it shoud be week 5, but hey, things don't always work out as you want them to. Last year, I was so sure I wanted to be a compositor, until I actually tried to be one, so here I am learning Houdini, which feels alot more "right" to me. I learnt so much in the past few weeks, should have started recording those nuggets of knowledge already really, but better late than never. In the past weeks I have learnt techniques used to create particle FX in Houdini using the POP network. I was able to get to grips with using the GROUPEXPRESSION sop to remove points in a geometry according to their colour and noise to create a dissolving sphere. Then merging that sphere with the particles from the popnet and grouping them with edges, such as the edge of a dissolving sphere. I also found that VEXpressions really aren't that scary at all. This was my initial render:

Initial Render of the Sphere, with Jitter

I faced a massive problem with framerate, as the render seemed to be missing "frames". I was alos advised that my particle birth rate was way to low.

On my second try I was able to fix the "jitter" by adding "substeps":

Partial Render of the Sphere, without jitter

I realised I did not use "substeps" which basically interpolates data between frames during the render and allows me to smoothen out my animation at 24fps. If I ever polish this project and render a new version, I'll edit this entry and talk about it!

And that concludes my first update! Next week I learnt about RBD simulations. Fun!