Houdini Isn’t Scary: Part 3 - Dynamics

Welcome back to Part 3 of the Houdini beginner tutorial series from Nine Between! In this part, we go over how to create dynamics. Dynamics are things that are driven by time. In Houdini, there is a separate context for working with Dynamics; it’s called DOPs (Dynamic Operators). Other geometry based work is done in SOPs (Surface Operators). In this tutorial though, we are going to be working with POPs (Particle Operators which are a subset of DOPs). When we create a dynamics network, we intend on outputting a simulation. A simulation is simply the calculated output of a dynamics network. If our network tries to calculate how liquid would move over time, it would take fluid dynamics into account, do some calculations (this part takes time for the computer to do) and then output a simulation. If we change anything in the dynamics network, we would need to re-simulate. All of the calculations are done by what is known as a solver. Each type of dynamics network in Houdini uses a different solver (FLIP, Pyro, V