Using The Ripple Solver

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The nice thing about Houdini is its versatility. Not only does it offer DOP solvers for fluids, RBDs and cloth, like many other applications, but it has some very specialized solvers, too. One of them being the ripple solver, that can be used to propagate waves across surfaces. And not only flat ones, like in this example!

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to set up a ripple solver and make a custom deformation VOP to deform the geo that is fed to the solver. By abusing the intended behaviour a bit we get around using complicated SOP solver setups and get the ball rolling, quickly.

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9 Comments

  1. Milad.Savar

    Great Tut ، Many thanks For sharing Your Experience

  2. Great tutorisl, you were able to make something complex seem easy.

  3. jeanMarc

    Thank you very much for this nice tutorial,

    i am wondering if it’s me or if it’s normal that the water level is lowering as the solver is running ?
    seem that it’s the case also in your scene but not sure… maybe in part II this will be solved nicely 🙂

    Great site, a lot of inspiring tips for Magicians!

    • jeanMarc

      Setting Rest Spring value at 1 in rippleSolver solved the problem for me.

      Thank You

  4. I am not very advanced but I would like to have the Asset of this work to download ?

    > creek_volume
    > water

    is it posible ?

  5. Hey Guys,

    I found another way of doing this that is pretty useful.

    Did you know that you can attrib transfer “v” inside of the sop solver to affect the motion of the ripples? You don’t even need to peak the geometry, as is done in this tutorial. This is useful if you want to create ripples from moving objects!

    Love your tutorials, guys!

  6. Can you use also the Distance VOP to do what you do with “subtract vectors and measure length”? Why choose one over the other?

    Thanks.

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