Day 30

Today I decided to work on the debris emission from the fracturing. My first idea was revolving around the foreach node. But after much trying, I realised it didn't work. After that I googled for "replacing particles with geometries". The search results came up with "instancing". Immediately I went in that direction.

Sidefx documentation on instancing:

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini9.5/copy/instancing

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini9.5/particles/instancing_rendering


I started giving it a try. But I encountered a problem. I couldn't view the instanced geometry at all in the viewport. I then did another search and people will talking on the forums that it is not possible to see instanced geometries in the viewport. Even sidefx documentation agreed on that. Below is how the starting test looks like:

This was all I could see from the test. I then did a test on the actual terrain and this is how it looks:

As you can see above, there is only particles even after I set up instance geometries. Below is how the hierarchy looks:

Not knowing why, I when to the forums and did more research, hopefully someone could have discussed it before. I found this thread which is almost the same as what I was talking about:

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/10539-instancing-crowd-animation/page__hl__instancing__fromsearch__1


I downloaded the hip file and decided to look at it. Below is how it looks,

This file is actually a crowd simulation of ants crawling. Below is the different hierarchies involved:


Instanced geometry:

The ant is modelled procedurally modelled in houdini.

Particle Instancer:

This is a simple particle emission simulation.

Copy Stamping:

This is copy stamping the geometry to the particles system.

After understanding how it all works, I did a test on the real terrain. Below is how it looks:

Ways to improve:
1: Reduce amount of particles emitting.
2:Time the particles to emit earlier

I did exactly the same as the ant file I downloaded from the forum. And it works!

We also saw Mr Ron today after 2 weeks. He took a brief glance at what we were doing and told us to update our blogs.