In the beginning of the tutorial I got confused very quickly. I was having a hard time understanding what Mehdi was talking about when he discussed UVs. The last time I also struggled to understand the concept of normals, which is a similar subject. I did a little bit of research online and found this diagram to be helpful:
-as well as the explanation that UV does not stand for anything but instead refers to the points used on the map, as XYZ are already taken in reference to area in space.
On to the project-
POP Object: a container for particles
POP Solver: toolbox for calculating the physics
POP Source: generates particles on the surface of the object
Scatter: generates points on the surface of the object
SOP Path: sources the object
At first I was worried because I couldn’t see my object in the POP network while Mehdi could, and then realized I simply had to move to a frame in which the points had begun conglomerating.
I was already really excited about my simulation with still half an hour left to go, and was surprised when Mehdi said “let’s make it more interesting”! There’s so much in Houdini I don’t know, I can only imagine all the awesome things that we could choose from.
I rendered our first flipbook:
But in the next step I was a bit confused. Mehdi created a sphere as a test object to work on our point attributes with, but when I did that, Houdini would not let me. Logically, the point simulation we created was coded to work with the group testgeometry_crag1, so they would not apply to the sphere.
I’m not sure why Houdini allowed Mehdi to do this, unless I missed a step along the way.
I managed to resolve this on my own, but the issue I’m proudest of resolving on my own was the inability to see any particle at all at frame 0- I remembered that we set the beginning frame to 235 in our popsource and went back to include all the frames. That, and I once again adjusted the parameters in the pscale to my own liking. I actually turned the birth rate way back up and made the particles even smaller.
Unfortunately, Houdini then crashed. And it was about 1 AM, so I called it a night.
Next day, though, I returned, with my brain function switched on, and I found it super easy to recreate the finished product.