I showed a wip of this render a week or so ago so here is the final result!

Rendered with Karma, comped in Cops.

A few megascans assets, a paradigm sim and some wispy mist sim!

Is anyone else experiencing bad performance with the new Houdini version? Like jumping into a network takes 10x more time than in the previous version and the UI is constantly lagging. Is it just me?

Background: petroleum engineer with solid fluid mechanics and thermodynamics knowledge, transitioning to Houdini FX with a focus on FLIP fluids and Pyro.

Current plan: 3 hours/day, self-taught over 4 years. Learning sequence:
SideFX H21 Foundations → houdini-course.com → Applied Houdini Volumes + Liquids + Rigids → Rebelway → fxphd → Pragmatic VFX

Target: a competitive demo reel and junior FX Artist position at a studio like DNEG Vancouver or Rising Sun Pictures.

Two honest questions for people who've been through this:

1. Is 4 years of self-directed study (3hrs/day) realistic for reaching junior studio level — or is this optimistic?
2. What's the single biggest gap between self-taught artists and those coming from schools like Gnomon or Sheridan?

Not looking for encouragement — looking for honest assessment from people who've actually hired or worked alongside junior FX artists.

Hey guys, I just installed Houdini 22 (non-commercial version), but for some reason, nothing shows up when I try to do anything but it just displays a black screen. I don't know how to fix it, and I don't think it's a graphics card issue. Does anyone have a solution? Please.

Hi, I'm making a drift car simulation.

First, I created a POP Solver for the tire smoke. Then I added the rest of the car as a VDB collision object using a Static Object node.

However, during the simulation, the particles seem to pass through the car. What am I doing wrong?

What are y'all trying first?

Hello wizards, I hope you're having a good day. I've seen the new system requirements of the 22 release and it says Windows 11 is mandatory. Are there any Win10 users out there like me? I've never been a fan of 11. It's such a piece of bloated bs but it seems there is no other way. I want to know if anyone out there tried it in win10? That being said, there is Linux, which if it weren't for games and very few other stuff i would've switched to it a longtime ago. Last time I tried it, it was brutal I couldn't even get the nvidia driver to work properly, but this one is on me since I tried Rocky, this distro in not for solos I guess but rather full departements. Anyways I got a reply from entagma before saying if I remember correcly fedora works perfectly fine for him (with QT5). I would like to know your experience with linux, what's your distro choice, and does it performance better than windows, and is x11 vs wayland (not supported yet) is an issue? Thanks a lot for you time!

Edit: it seems it works in win10 but sideFX is simply saying it's better to use the supported system.

Proof of concept.

Goal: pure Houdini equivalent to https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/Hunyuan3D-Part (both segmentation and shape reconstruction) without running any model.

surfacedist() does heavy lifting. Extremely fast on ~400k mesh. Near real time on my laptop as i was drawing colors while previewing result.

The amazing part of this segmentation approach is that all i have to do is to draw colors on logical seams, paint a few blobs of color in center a piece to make a connected color island.

Started exploring ways to make Houdini equivalent of Tencent's X-Part (structure-coherent shape decomposition). Tricky one.

Use case: high poly sculpt without groups/scan/llm generated mesh post processing.

( my english not that good ) >>> hello guys

iam planing to get a new pc :

( didn`t chose cpu yet but maybe i5 12f )

with rtx 5060ti 8g

and 16g ram ( 2x8 already bought it )

so iam asking if this is good for entrying houdini

i don`t have mony to upgrade more than it i don`t have options else 9060xt 16g

and i think amd isn`t good in this stuff .

I tried attribute transfer the V attribute from the sim particles to the meshed sim but I'm getting weird shifting topologies and UVs

I've been working on a way to procedurally generate these edge damage decals for days, but things are getting very complicated, and I would really appreciate some help. I've found little information about this topic online, and most tutorials just place these edges manually, which is not reasonable for a very large scale environment. Playing RE Requiem, I've noticed these everywhere and in very complex geometry, so they must be created procedurally. Hopefully someone here has dealt with a similar problem and could lend me a hand. Thanks again.

Is there a way to join connected pieces? I want to have less pieces in my sim and there are so many small pieces which are so close to each other so I thought to use them as 1 piece but just fusing them doesn't work, is there a way to connect neighboring pieces and treat them as one?

wanted to make something a bit simpler, I tend to overly focus on the technical execution/novelty of my personal work, so this was refreshing. It's basically just copy to points with some wrangles for movement/lag on the helmets/spears.

houdin/nuke/davinci(grade and fairlight)

I’m working on a particle setup for snow/rain.

I want to blast only the particles that eventually collide with the collision object, but I want them to be visible before they hit as well—not just at the frame of impact.

Here’s what I tried:
I used a Collision Detect node to detect collisions and stop the particles when they hit.
Then I used a Blast node with the condition hittotal > 0.
The problem is that this only gives me the particles at the moment they collide. Before the collision happens, those particles don’t exist in the blast result.

To debug, I isolated a single particle. Inside the POP Network I expected @id == @ptnum, but it looks like the particle’s ID changes over time.
Could the Collision Detect node be affecting the IDs?

Is there a way to select or group all particles that eventually collide and stop, while keeping their entire lifetime (including the frames before the collision), instead of only the collision frame?

The reason I’m trying to do this is that I don’t actually need a huge number of particles in the final result.
If I emit particles only above the collision area, the effect looks too artificial. Also, fewer particles end up hitting the collision object than I expected.

My idea was to make the emitter much larger and emit a lot more particles from the start. That way, more particles naturally hit the collision object, and it’s easier to adjust the final amount later by keeping only the particles that eventually collide.

The effect I’m trying to create is something like snow or rain falling from the sky and hitting a collision object.

Am I overcomplicating this?

Thanks for your help and advice!

Houdini FX, Karma renderer. Pyro solver, vellum cloth, flip solver.

Do you guys know if there is a way to get anisotropic microscratches with karma xpu and mtlx?

I have been working on a car paint shader and would really like to add them. I don't see a way of using the OSL scratchmap generator from github in mtlx as it doesn't support that yet. Usually that's what I would do.

Using a bump map really doesn't work, because subpixel sample values producing fireflies/not showing up at all. Also I like taking the anisotropic approach for cleaner renders :)

Hi everyone,

I'm running into a strange issue with FLIP and I would like to know if anyone has experienced something similar.

I created a simple setup where I pour water from one container into another identical container. The problem is:

When Enforce Air Incompressibility is disabled, the simulation behaves normally. The final water level in the second container matches the original water volume.

However, when I enable Enforce Air Incompressibility, the final water level becomes significantly higher.

Things I have checked:

• ✅ No reseeding
• ✅ No sink/source
• ✅ Disabling Air Incompressibility fixes the issue
• ✅ Collision geometry is identical between the two containers

I understand that Enforce Air Incompressibility is mainly designed to preserve enclosed air volumes (for example bubbles or "glugging" water containers), and I actually really like the effect it produces.

I would like to understand the recommended workflow when using this feature:

1. How can I maintain approximately the same water level/volume after pouring between containers while keeping Enforce Air Incompressibility enabled? Is there a specific setting or workflow to prevent the liquid level from increasing?
2. In what situations should an additional Sink be used together with Enforce Air Incompressibility? Since the feature already handles air volume preservation quite well, I'm not sure when manually adding a Sink is necessary or recommended.
3. Are there any important settings or limitations that I should be aware of when using Enforce Air Incompressibility? For example, collision settings, field resizing, pressure settings, particle separation, or other FLIP solver parameters.

Thanks for any advice!