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PDG 101 - Pt.3: Wedging 2

Tweaking simulation parameters until you end up with something that looks decent can be a pain. Why not automate that task and let Houdini try out a bunch of paramters by itself while you grab some lunch?


In this video, Chris Kopic walks you through another extremely helpful use case for wedging: Automatically running sims with different parameter values.

PDG 101 - Pt.3: Wedging 2

Comments

Keep getting errors on a couple of the ropfetch work items. why might this be?

Stefanie Joelle Okemow

Hi ! I'm not sure if I should be the one answering this, but the red button with a white cross in the middle just below the TOP Network View's Pane Header (on the toolbar where the progress bar is, you might need to expand it to see it) should do the job!

Daiki Hashimoto

Thanks for the tutorial! I have one question that might be a stupid one, but how can you stop the cooking of the tops network when it is in progress? I forgot to add the opengl renderer to the rop path before starting the pdg process so I wanted to stop it or pause it. But when I right click any given node I can't see an option to stop or pause the node. What am I missing? Is the command to simply dirty the node?

Dag Kjetsa

Hey! This is a tricky one to answer. There's one case were you definitely want to check all frames in one batch and that's if your running your topnet on multiple computers via hqueue. On a single machine things are more complicated. At least in my tests I never encountered sim-runup-times while processing single frames or batches, so there might be a sweet spot for the optimal batch size in terms of rendertime. In all honesty though, for a big project I'd run small benchmarks to find the right value, for smaller stuff I'd just check "All frames in one badge".

Entagma_Chris

Hi, thank you for sharing your knowledge. I have learn some PDG from Ari and Mo. They both talking about "All frames in one batch" if I am caching a sim because frames depend on each other. You don't want to sim 0-10 frames, then start again, sim to 0-10 and cache to 10-20. Can you cofirm that Houdini is really clever enough to know that is caching sim? Also why not do frame per batch or why not do 20 per batch. How do you decide how many frames per batch you going to do? Thank you :)

Leah Zard

This is great and I got it working with my vellum sims to wedge setups at night. BUT if I turned the cache off on the solver, collisions failed after the runup. I'm assuming the setup I had was more memory intensive than the example scene. I'm going to see if I can set up a simple example and send it to sidefx.com forum for some feedback.

Geordie Martinez

Thank you for demystifying this! Such a great download of knowledge.

Morgan Visconti

wonderful tutorial! very well explained, can't wait for the next one

Joris Putteneers

I just happen to need this exact knowledge at the moment. Thank you.

Geordie Martinez


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