Fixed a few things with the particle motion blur stuff. Mostly it was just to get rid of an issue where you could see the particles when rendered zipping back to 0,0,0 when they died. I changed the popnet so that the particles always die when the camera shutter is closed... I think this was because the surface shader is only evaluated once, so when a particle died (alpha set to 0) the surface shader wasn't used again so the alpha wasn't updated from the sim... The only problem with the fix is that you can't have any particles that live for less than the shutter time... This is useful for sparks (you can see some particles colliding in the image above), I also made a little point cloud shader that is also useful for sparks :D Houdini - particle deformation blur and point cloud lighting from Sam Hancock on Vimeo . The shader on the spheres and ground plane just loop through the particles and does diffuse, attenuation and shadows. A single frame took about 6.5 ...
There is no doubt that Houdini is a most unusual creature, for this is a hamster with an advanced vocabulary and a terribly immodest opinion of his own superior brain power. Houdini believes without question that hamsters are a higher form of life than humans. He is, however, a kindhearted creature (generally speaking) and tolerates the bumbling ways of humans well enough.