POP streams, for POPs or even RBDs.

Bit of a waffly post here.. mostly for my own ref..

I had a case where there were a bunch of colour swatch cards in a display case of sorts. They needed to fly out of their resting position, but also had to vibrate and wiggle a little before this.
For context - I chose to use RBDs & the Bullet Solver, packed primitives for all of this, as there didn't need to be any clothy/plastic Vellum defomations.

So-

1) 10-15 frames run-up sim to settle
2) Cards gradually wiggle, not all at once.
3) Some cards shoot out of their position, not all at once.

The challenge is to effectively create an activation for the individual forces that effect the cards.

At first I was using the RBD-branded wind and fan forces - which did provide the necessary dynamic effect, but I couldn't figure out a way to use groups, or to trigger their activations on a per-packed-piece-point basis. These forces were connected one after another in a chain.


The solution is to use POP-Streams. In my case, we can plug this into an Rigid Body Solver (the 3rd input), as it already has a multi-solver, bullet solver and some other clever bits built into it.
We need to create a master POP stream with the rule set to include all the calculated points. You can/should initialise any values in this stream to account for any points that aren't picked up by the other streams. This might include making them active or not...
From this we can then connect secondary POP streams, each with their own rules and POP force nodes.

I tended to use the random stream option as a way to gradually and naturally add points to the stream.
Something I tried to get working was splitting streams one step further.. eg. A splits off to B ...but B then splits into C & D. This didn't quite go as planned.

I was trying to achieve a slow random addition to a stream/group and then for the cards to go either to the Left or Right, using POP forces. A bit of an inelegant solution, but I ended up creating two streams instead of B producing it's own two, (A divides into B AND C) using SOP bounding boxes. To achieve the random addition effect, I animated a threshold, which determined when the cards would activate. Each stream would then have its own POP forces. Much more control overall.

Shattering an animated object. Eg. flying saucer smashing into something

Say you want to make a moving object smash into bits. Eg. A flying saucer that's been hand animated, which then needs to break apart dynamically.
As usual this isn't going to be straightforward :)

Shatter and pack geometry as usual, only what we need to do is ensure the points are not active. You can be double sure by laying down a point wrangle and setting i@active=0;

In your DOP network, make sure the RBD is not an active rbd as initial state. Set it to deforming static object. This should be done in the drop down menu. Now if you hit play, the object should not simulate at all & only follow it's given animation. "Overwrite Attributes" is NOT ticked.

We will use a sop solver & a point wrangle within to set the active value to 1. I've found using an activating shape like a box to set points into a group (using the bounding option) works best for this. eg. the saucer rbd points don't become active until they pass through said box. The attribute "deforming" (an integer) must be set to 0 once the "active" value switches to 1. This is so it no longer animates, or as Houdini refers to it, "deforms".
We use a sop solver so that the active value stays at 1 and doesn't reset to 0 once it passes through the activating shape. What we also need to do is use this sop solver in conjunction with the Bullet solver. This is done with a multi-solver.

Things I've found that are a bit problematic are glue constraints... Will look into this.
Update on glue - 

Houdini 16.0.504.2 has a weird thing... The Constraint Network's "Overwrite with SOP" attribute's default value is supposed to only import the SOP on the first frame...but it seems to behave as if it's always importing it. As a result, set it to 0 (zero), so that the animation of the object is ignored. This seems to make the glue constraints work properly.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2eKYZ42BvalZnFaY0NZMkhwb3M/view?usp=sharing