[ Houdini Cookoff ] 09

Ok so I spent several hours over the last 3 days trying to get a good fluid sim to work. However the look is far different from the reference, and it's time to look for cheaper, faster solutions ;-) Taking a closer look at the milk pour (see reference in this post), it can be observed that there is actually very little reaction to the surface of the tea, whilst the fluid sims I've got have a very visible reaction.

Hence, I've decided to go with a procedurally based solution in SOPs - to actually model and procedurally animate the milk stream as geometry. Looking at the stream, it can be generated using multiple curves that are shaped and joined together. A handy way of generating a mesh from curves, is with volumes - or more accurately, signed distance fields. A good readup can be found in "Levelsets In Production: Spider Man 3".


I did a quick test to make sure the blending works in Houdini, just using a Volume Mix set to minimum.

A few nodes are added to ensure that both sdfs to be merged are of the same dimensions.