Hey guys. This is going to be a real quick Houdini tip and I’m going to show you how to use the sculpt particle fluid. So the first thing I’m going to do is control click my grid and lay down a grid and I’m going to change my rows to 50 and my columns to 50. There, that looks a lot better. I’m going to turn off my construction grid because sometimes I just like to work with it all for most of the time.

So now we have this grid, 50x50. So let’s deselect everything, hit the tab key and type sculpt and grab the sculpt node. Select the grid that you want to sculpt and hit return, not necessary the grid if you had something else, you would select something else. In other words, it’s asking you select the object that you want to sculpt, and select it and hit enter and there we go. Now we have this sculpt tool. If you look real close, I have this little circle at the tip of my mouse. If I hold my shift key and left click and drag, I can make it bigger and smaller.

So the way I’m going to sculpt with this is, use the middle mouse button; the middle mouse button will sculpt it in and the left mouse button will pull it back out. So if I push this in with the middle mouse, you can see there it goes in. Use my left mouse button and it pulls it back out, and you can make mountains, you know, you can pull up like this and you can keep clicking and keep doing it and you get the idea. Alternatively, you can hit the middle mouse button and indent and I’m going to make a little indention here around this mountain we just made like this. I’m going to take it a little deeper than that, so let’s work with it a minute here. I’ll go around here and make it a little bit deeper, that way you all can get an idea of what I’m trying to convey. Okay, I think that’s going to be deep enough to suit our purposes.

Now, it looks like if we wanted to, we could have a little bit of a fluid coming up here and running down these little indention that I’ve made here. That’s just an idea, that just what I was going to go with but this is just a quick example so I’m just going to show you how to use this tool instead of showing you how to animate part, you know, this fluid and stuff because it will just take too long.

The objective of this is the sculpt tool, so we’ve used the sculpt tool. Now, I need to show you how to use this sculpt particles tool, but we can’t use this sculpt particles tool until we have some particles, some fluids; sculpt fluids. So what we’re going to do is, I’m going to control click another grid and lay down another grid on top of it, okay. Now you can see what we go going on here; this little hollow spot in between these two grids. So what I’m going to do is go to my liquid shelf, deselect everything and I want to select this sculpted, okay. Sculpted particle fluid, select it and then it’s going to ask you to select the fluid surface which is the grid we just added. I’m going to select it and hit enter. Then it’s going to ask me to select the terrain object, which is the grid that we sculpted originally and then hit return.

Now it’s going to ask me to select obstacle particles. Now if you had something in the scene, you know, obstacle objects, I’m sorry, now if you had something in the scene that you’ve wanted the fluid to interact with, say an obstacle like a dam or a rock and the flow of the water, you would select that now and hit return. But since we don’t have any obstacle objects, I’m just going to go ahead and hit return without selecting anything. When I do this, it’s going to cook for a minute and it’s going to give me some fluids. And there we go. Now as you can see, it gave me some fluids inside where I sculpted, okay. And if I hit play, you will see, it falls down in there like that. You may hit the L key over this and lay this out. You can go into your auto dot network, okay, double click, select your grid object to sculpted node, you can go up to particle separation and you can take that down. I’m going to take it to 0.2. You don’t want to take it too low because it will take forever. So we’re going to make it about .2, hit return. Let’s go back up to object level. If you go into your sculpted fluid, now because we have this visualized, we can go in and increase our surface distance and you can see how that’s affecting our scene. You can up it way up or you can take it way down, it’s really up to you. You need to go and finest it how you see fit. But there you go, that’s the sculpt particle nodes.

I hope you learned something. See you next time.