Geoff Bailey

A little hard to tell exactly without a hip file. But I'd guess that the half sphere has something to do with your sphere setup. The alembic you are bringing in defaults to a packed alembic. Instead of loading it as individual points and prims, it gets loaded as a single primitive per object. This helps speed load and playback times, but it means that when houdini looks at it, it doesn't really see a sphere it sees (likely) a single point.

Then you're piping that into a sphere node, which uses its input to set bounding regions. It may be that since it's not reading a full sphere out of the alembic node, it's not creating a proper sphere with the sphere node.

Instead, after the alembic node append a convert node and set it to convert to "polygons". The pipe that directly into the scatter node.

And lastly I'm guessing the smoking isn't rising is because in addition to setting a density attribute, you also need to set a temperature attribute before you rasterize the attributes. No temperature, and there's nothing to drive the movement of the smoke.

Post a hip file if it's still not working.

It's about time, AWS...

Deadline 10.4.0.10¶
This is a hotfix release to address issues in the Karma plugin and the Repository installer.

Application Plugin Improvements¶
Karma

Added Houdini Karma submitter and plugin.
Fixed the bug where the frames argument was missing from the Karma standalone plugin.

Thanks Dan, I'll take a look at this as well.

But i also have to say that I tried Esther's suggestion and it's become by main way of building up component scripts. It still feels a little beta-ish understandably, but it really cuts down on the repetitive work of finding and making nodes and connections.

The script below is just a simple test script that adds an additional transform object and parents the root of a joint chain to it. I haven't had time yet to go back and experiment with a more complex component script, but the basic idea should hold.

Just build up your custom script manually inside an edit graph node and then when you've got your tool working, create a component script, and copy your manual setup into a graph::template node. Use the graph::AddSubnet to add the template to the graph. Then the only part you have to redo, is to connect the inputs and outputs and promote any necessary parameters (still annoying, but much easier than rebuilding the tool from scratch with a whole bunch of addNode and findAndConnect nodes...