Houdini Diary #5 - Liquidating

23/04/2025 This is the first time I tried doing a FLIP simulation, and to be fair, it was actually easier than RBD simulations, but that is probably because I learnt many things from my RBD week that made FLIP seem easier to tackle. This week is also very SOLARIS heavy. Anyways, this is the final result at the "half-way point", a more refined render with velocity blur will be posted below, if it renders out in time: Midway point render:

FLIP render with no actor material

PROJECT FILE:

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Key points from this week:

• When a geometry has the "shop_materialpath" attribute, it will cause problems when assigning materials in the SOLARIS context. This is because the context uses attributes with the term "path" in them to assign groups to geometries. And as the attribute mentioned above has "path" in it. It causes problems.

  
  

• In some cases, you have to use the "rendergeometrysettings" LOP to initialise attributes and values contained within a geometry. For example, velocity blur, if the geometry has velocity, this LOP will apply that velocity to create the blur for render.

  
  

• The "Y" box size value of a bounding box will ALWAYS be double the value of the "Box Center". So if you change the box size, just divide the box center by 2 to have the box rest at the initial origin. Or use paste relative references.
  

Anyways, this is the 2nd "more polished" render with velocity blur and ped materials:

And that's it for this week!