I have been trying to make a scene in Houdini where a drop of water falls about three meters, and then splashes into an oddly shaped container. It has not been going as well as I would have hoped. First, I had to make it so the particles were not being formed uniformly, because then I would get a uniform splash and it would look fake. Looking though controls on the emitter node for a little while solved that problem when I found jitter. I then added drag to the particles, and I was inexperienced with drag, so that took a little learning too.
Now, most of these problems I have just listed were not too big, and were easy to solve. However, I have one big problem that has been hounding me throughout this whole project, and I have yet found a way to solve it. The container that the drop of water is falling into is not a simple or normally shaped container. It looks somewhat like a modern squashed glass vase. This is hard to represent well in a collision mesh, and still being relatively new to Houdini, I am having trouble doing so. It would be easier if I did not have to represent interior features, but I do, or else the container is not container, and is then worthless. I have been using the trial and error method, but this is not the best method, since each collision geometry takes anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours to generate. So, I have posted my problem on the Side Effects Houdini Forums, which is full of great, helpful people, and hoping someone there knows a way to get an accurate collision mesh for my geometry.
Container: http://img56.imageshack.us/img56/5651/containeret0.png
Resulting Collision Geometry: http://img56.imageshack.us/img56/9083/collisiongeometrydr3.png
2 comments:
Good luck with your project man, and don't get discouraged, this stuff can be a headache when you're learning what does what.
Thanks. I plan to do another article on it soon once I finish rendering it, and I'm going to mention you in it. Your collision geometry worked very well.
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