I want to animate balls dropping into a pool. The pool will be made of 7 water layers of different colors. For instance when a red ball falls it will make a splash in the red water layer, then about 1/2 second later a blue ball will fall and affect the blue layer. Well, I think you get the idea. Can this be done? I want to put it to music and maybe have the balls represent the different notes on a scale.

<tongue-in-cheek> yes.

danteA
<tongue-in-cheek> yes.

Thank you mister helper man. :shock: :roll:

Hello Harlequin,

I'm down with what you're doing.
Unfortunately I'm a beginner in many ways to Houdini….
but I couldn't help but try to aid you after such a….
(well I won't say it) response.
My lame attempt to aid you in such a manner.
But hey, we all have to start somewhere, and I can certainly empathize given the (sometimes) rudimentary questions I post.

Since you want scales,
you could set up some form of mathematic division based on distance of object to collision plane, or vice versa.
Same mathematical division that Pythagoras shot his wad on. Distance=harmonics and basic subdivisions… or even Micro-tonal.
The distance-harmonic can be as large or small as need be to gain the affect you want… as long as it adheres to the basic divisional equation.

I think the first steps are to create a particle system that releases particles at some form of interval (automated or animated).
These particles will be allowed to collide with only the surface that you choose them to collide with.
A collision event could be created, that triggers a sample (wav or aiff) with a trigger chop that references the collision event (the particle hitting the surface.
An object (such as a sphere) could then be attached to the particle (as well as a meta-object that works as a “magnet-deformer”) to push and pull on the surface it's colliding with.

If this doesn't make much sense, check out the old PDF tutorials available on the side-fx “community page”. Check out the “chops” and “pops” tutorials. Many of these are written for older versions, so they can be a bit of a pain in the neck, but if you can decipher how things may have been updated, it's a really key source of info.

Also there is a great chop that is called the “Oscillator” that actually creates synthetic tones and is initially set-up to conform to the western scale.
You can also have Midi input and output through Houdini. You can trigger animation, or use animation to trigger sound. Far-freakin out blah!

also check out “www.derivitiveinc.com” for realtime performance solutions in a Houdini-esk software.

Hope that helps
Visual music baby!

Jim Ellis

Good on yah Jim for throwing some suggestions in there. I think the lack of serious initial comments is the open-ended nature of the question. Frankly, this is what we get paid to do - here's the challenge, now how best to approach it? I think more suggestions would have been forthcoming if harlequin had put some thought into it initially and had a rough plan of attack, looking for thoughts or opinions, rather than just throwing out the challenge and looking for a HOWTO(or so it seemed to me, anyway). Of course it can be done, in dozens of different ways, it's just a matter of which areas are your strengths and how you'd *think* you'd like to approach it. There's always lots of ways to do things, in any package.

I think it's great to have lively discussions of solutions to problems - it helps us all - but enthusiasm is usually increased when there's already an initial investment.

Cheers,

J.C.

Very good Jim, thank you very much. I think it is exactly what i was looking for.