This week was spent finding a solution to the particle transition. I tried multiple solutions I thought of in Houdini, but none of them worked. After this I tried looking for resources online, looking for anything specifically related to Gaussian Splatting is very difficult as the technology is still very new, and as this was a very specific use case in just one of many DCCs there was 0 resources. I then turned to generic Houdini particle tutorials, I explored the entire SideFX learn database and couldn’t find anything similar to the effect I wanted. I tried multiple search terms on youtube and google and found one or two tutorials that were similar but they had flaws that meant they wouldn’t work with my project. I turned to GPT and Gemini for solutions, but they provided no help at all. Finally I went back to searching and found one source on creating a particle dissolve effect.
The man concept behind this effect is to have particles spawn on the points every frame, but having a mask that ensures there is a new set of points active every frame that do not repeat. The way this is achieved is by initially setting a group of points as active by giving them an attribute. This is then put into a DOP network that expands the selection by a desired amount. The DOP network can then get the data from the current frame, and compare it to the last frame, any points that are active on the current frame but weren’t on the previous frame get added to a transition group. This group is then used as the mask for the points.
