Brief Summary

So for my fluid grid the initial problems that arose in this shot were mainly to do with the collisions of my geometry, the grid I had created to contain the fluid was not reacting correctly with the fluid, so instead of it hitting the grid and reacting to it, the fluid simply sank straight through it. After some hunting around on various houdini forums, I found that the problem with the grid was that I was using the new version of the extrude tool, which unlike the old version did not apply thickness to the geometry, and as it turns out, when creating a collision object, without thickness they do not register correctly. The fix for this was a fairly simple one, in that I just began using the old extrude tool over the new one, which did apply some thickness to my geometry, and fixed the problem fairly quickly.

Another problem encountered with collisions was that some of my particles phased through the surface of the geometry, and began flashing in my first iterative render, again, this was a fairly simple fix in editing the grid geometry, but a costly one, since to render out the scene took upwards of 30 hours. I did however take advantage of this fact, since I had a desire to change the lighting setup of my scene as well as the material shaders on my fluid. While it was a time costly mistake to make, I much prefer the newer version of my render.

One thing I would definitely change given more time with this project, is the visible build up of fluid towards the middle point of the simulation, because I had accidentally turned down the noise in the popforce node, the force acted in a straight line, making the buildup of fluid look quite unnatural as the scene progressed. While it is a very small mistake, which most people I had showed the work to did not notice, I was not completely satisfied with the quality of the render.

My final render can be viewed here.