Hello!
I have made a tool to generate bullet impacts in houdini, including the holes, sprite dust, debris, and interactive lights.
It is based on Daniel P. Ferreira’s Impact System tool (http://www.danielpferreira.com), and I’ve made a very similar video showing the system.
It is a houdini digital asset, so I haven’t written any type of code.
Hope you like it! 
Video (13 Mb): http://www.miguelperezsenent.com/Media/Reel/bulletsim_divx.avi
That’s awesome. I’ve never used Houdini, what does “houdini digital asset” mean exactly?
Thanks guys!
Well… it is difficult to understand correctly if you have never used houdini before.
Imagine that you create a very big pflow operators tree, put all the operators into a single one, and in the parameters tab append the parameters that you are going to use ( size of the shape, birth rate, etc), so you mustn’t create all the tree each time, just a single operator. This is more powerful than a preset.
But in max you can’t create this system without scripting. In houdini is really “easy” to make complicated systems connecting operators (everything is done with nodes).
In this tool, when I select the impact geometry, a operator calculates automatically all the impact zones to subdivide since the first frame.
I don´t know how difficult it is to achieve something
so cool like that, but I really like it! Very cool FX!
Keep it up!
Cool tool, never heared before about Houdini Digital Asset, but looks like it works as Macro
in Fusion. Hope in one day Autodesk will create something similar in Max.
Do you know if Houdinis node-system can be compared to Cinema4ds Xpresso? In Xpresso you can setup a node-tree to have all kind of different effects, group that in a PGroup and have custom inputs to that so you basically have one custom node that contains the tree but the user doesn’t need to work with the tree but only plug in some stuff to the custom inputs.
Cool video
from the Houdini Help:
Digital assets are custom operator types built from node networks. You encapsulate the network in a digital asset, and then “promote” parameters from nodes inside the asset up as parameters or handles on the asset itself.
Digital assets let you capture the functionality of [i]any[/i] network... a character, a compositing effect, a particle system, a light... as a reusable tool with a customized interface you can put in the hands of artists.
For example, you can create a light asset that encapsulates a light object tweaked the way you want [i]as well as[/i] the light and shadow shaders. You can then promote various parameters of the light and the shaders to create a single interface for the custom light instead of moving back and forth between three different nodes. Once you have the light encapsulated as a digital asset, you can reuse it in any number of projects.
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so basically digital assets are custom tools built with the nodes etc within Houdini…that can be shared with others…
on The Wild, all the characters, props, sets etc were single digital assets…
it’s an incredibly powerful system…
That is some pretty cool effects What about objects moving like you have there, can they be effected by the impact? Would be nice to see that board and “tire” get destroyed by the bullets, i wonder how you would do the linkage for each bullet to affect objects, awesome work.
Luis
Could the bullets completely destroy an object? What happens when I keep firing at the same spot?
so is digital asset a concept just to Houdini or there are packages which have it but under different names?
I see that with XSI 6, their new Delta Referencing system - http://www.softimage.com/products/xsi/tour/video_tour.aspx?video_id=22 - seems to have similar functionality to both Houdini Digital Assets and Takes combined - looks pretty cool. It seems to be more automated than Houdini’s approach which is more open. Funny how they’ve billed it as a “breakthrough approach to collaborative 3D animation” though.
Here’s an early customer story detailing HDA workflow when they first appeared on the scene - http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=52&Itemid=68
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