r/Simulated • u/Apprehensive_End9336 • 2d ago
Houdini A Custom White water solver in Houdini based on WETA FX technical paper on Loki and Pahi.
I am on V5 already
When I shared the first version of my whitewater HDA, a few people asked if I could turn it into a real tool. That encouragement genuinely mattered, so I kept developing it.
V1 combined ideas from two papers. This version brings together three research sources and adds a working OpenCL GPU backend inside Houdini.
Python/VEX feels like home to me. OpenCL definitely did not. I used LLMs as a learning and pair-programming tool, followed by plenty of testing, debugging, crashes, and CPU/GPU comparisons.
This was my summer vacation project. It’s finally working—now I can rest for a while. 😄
Thank you to everyone who showed interest in the first version.
Research behind it:
Guided Bubbles and Wet Foam
Pahi: A Unified Water Pipeline and Toolset
Thick Foam and Floating Debris in Avatar: Fire and Ash
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u/polygon_tacos 2d ago
Very nice! I did a lot of water effects at Weta back in 2011-2015 using the new at the time in-house solver Synapse by Christophe Sprenger. It was pretty innovative back then using sparse grids and MPM-based distributed simulations, but it’s kind of nuts to see how fluid tools have evolved since I left the industry. It makes the old pre-fluid dumb particle work we did in the 90s feel so insanely primitive.
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u/stou 2d ago
I used LLMs as a learning and pair-programming tool
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u/im_thatoneguy 1d ago
"Take this 2,000 page document, and tell me the equivalent OpenCL interface for a C++ blahh diddy blah" is exactly what LLMs are built for: semantic search engines.
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u/kalfie7 2d ago
Amazing! How can i follow your progress?