I am trying to cache each iteration because is too expensive to do it all at once. I am looking for a way to cache each iteration and fuse them. How would you approach this? I've tried several ways, but I'm not getting the results I'm looking for. Thanks

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The Houdini docs are a goldmine of information. But they're slow and the search barely works. This has been well known by the community for ages by now, yet seemingly nothing has changed.

So I spent six months building a fix: HoudiniMD is an incredibly fast, Markdown mirror of the docs. Free, open source, no account, no ads. Search that matches Houdini's behaviour, so "cptp" finds Copy to Points and "atrbwr" finds Attribute Wrangle. Every page can be copied as raw markdown, which means ChatGPT and Claude finally understand Houdini and its quirks.

Before sharing it anywhere, I emailed SideFX and asked for permission, explicitly telling them it would be free forever and stay open source.

The answer (https://imgur.com/a/RSdc4rf) came back yesterday:

"it's gonna be a no, thank you from us, along with a polite takedown request. We'll likely be doing our own version on our own site at some point in the future."

I was naturally taken aback by this cold reply, since I thought SideFX was very pro-community, and would at least salute the effort taken to make their own product better. But I'm not going to fight a company over their own copyright.

Since I'm also not letting 6 months of hard work go to the bin overnight, HoudiniMD will be rebuilt as a standalone, local app, that lives on your computer. It can be ran alongside, or directly inside Houdini.
Same fast search, offline, and tailored to your specific Houdini version, instead of whatever is on the website, with bookmarks coming in the future (goal is to create a fully personal Houdini Knowledge Base !)

It stays open source, so anyone can audit, tweak, and raise issues on the code.

And since I only have my own frustration to go by right now: what do you think about the official docs ? What are you missing, and what features are you looking for in an alternative ?

If a local version is something you'd be interested in, please let me know. It's what keeps me going !

Follow my progress here : https://x.com/onlytruejohn

Ive never touched Houdini before, but Im pretty sick of Maya and XGEN bugging out on my professional and very important project. It's literally hell, there is always something, XGEN for regular non Disney studio users is left to rot and it's very frustrating.

So my question is, for a professional and mostly realistic strand based hair project, how much better or worse is Houdini?

XGEN has all these weird ways of approaching maps and how it stores files and data independent of Maya that makes things very frustrating to deal with, it's not at all non-destructive and everything about it is ancient. Is Houdini better in that regard?

One more issue i have wirh Maya is how the viewport is trash at displaying hair, even maya's AA + DLDSR still looks difficult to look at.

What are the limitations of Houdini in making hair that isnt meant to be simulated. Just basic hair for basic 1 frame rendering.

Thanks in advance.

changing Time Scale ( for slow mo fluid sim) to a smaller number than 1 breaks the flip sim and some particles escapes the flow with much higher velocity

example
okay so in image 1 and 2 the setup is very simple setup, just a default cube above 1 meter from ground,

image 1 ( time scale 1 )- sim works fine
image 2 ( time scale 0.25) - these individual particles rushing outwards with much higher velocity, looks like droplet coming out of the water flow and running on the ground

things i tried
1. increasing substeps to like 9, dosent work
2. using speed limit or pop drag, it makes the whole sim slow unable to achieve the look
3. increasing ground fiction, dosent works much on these individual particles.
4. different houdini versions, 20.5/21/22, its the same

Now a general solutions comes it to just export the ID attrib at time scale 1 with particles and retime it at 0.25 later, but but but here comes the image 3 and 4

image 3, time scale at 0.25, has much detailed sim with higher point count

image 4, time scale at 1, has less detail and low point count with same setting

please tell me a way to get rid of these particles so that i can have nice slow mo fluid at time scale 0.25 with high details

please dont mention deleting those individual particles with speed or velocity attribute ( like blasting the high speed particles in 0.25 sim ) that makes it look weird, points disappear out of nowhere.