Hello Houdini community.
I am very new to houdini but I have a project that I want to push myself to complete it in Houdini.
I hope to get some useful tips from experienced artists.

The project
I have a building, the roof is covered with roof tiles. I need the roof tiles to:
-fly away from the building
-start circling around it
-transform into a bird and keep circling
-all birds finally converge together and form a big bird

For now I want to focus on the 1st part only.
I created a single tile and grids that cover the roof. I used a Copy Stamp node to distribute the tiles on the roof. That gave me the look I wanted.

Now I want all tiles to fly away. I really want to do it with a POP network because I like all the control you can have over the particles. But after many attempts I start to think this may not be the way to go. I just cannot manage to attach each tile to a particle.

Using the simple Particle node (Behaviour: Modify Source Geometry) did make the tiles fly away from the roof. But I don't feel I have much control over them once they start moving (I am probably wrong).

This is how far I got. How would you approach this?

On the copy node there is an option to “pack and instance” your roof tiles. Afterwards you can treat them like points.

Check the attachment and make sure to read about:
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/model/packed.html [www.sidefx.com]

Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it!
I already have access to the points although I did another way. Yours saves me a bunch of nodes
My question though is if is there a way to make a particle system take over the points and move the roof tiles with it?
I can imagine the motion I want can be done with VEX expressions but that's way too advanced for me.
Cheers!

Attached a little example setup. As others have said, if you pack your geometry you can treat the tiles as points, which you can then feed directly to a pop sim (on the pop source set the mode to ‘all geometry’ rather than the default ‘scatter on surfaces’).

A better way is to use packed RBD. You still get to treat it as a particle setup, use pop forces like pop wind, pop axis etc, but you also get proper collisions on things, and nice rotation and tumbling of pieces.

-matt

That's brilliant. Thanks a lot, Matt! I appreciate the file you shared. It was very easy to follow even for a beginner like me.
I guess I didn't understand Konstantin's post correctly, sorry about that.