Gio Gargiulo plans to include it in his toolkit for organic growth effects.
Houdini Enthusiast Gio Gargiulo has shared an initial version of his mesh-based fluid solver, loosely inspired by Jos Stam's Stable Fluids paper and coming to his custom toolkit for growth effects. The solver operates entirely on point attributes, making it independent of UVs and compatible with any mesh topology.
Performance is reportedly already reasonably fast at this stage, though it could be further improved with optimization, or potentially a rewrite in OpenCL, since it's currently implemented entirely in VEX. It also supports external sources, and additional work is needed to improve mass conservation throughout the simulation.
Once complete, Gio will add the solver into GGro, his toolkit designed to become a unified framework for simulating a wide range of organic phenomena: think corals, mold, branching structures, slime, and more.
The toolkit features solvers, influence nodes for guiding simulations, and various utility nodes for post-processing and general Houdini tasks. GGro is currently in beta, with ongoing work needed to improve performance, documentation, and to clean up the user interface. You can download it here:
Follow Gio Gargiulo on X/Twitter for development updates and subscribe to our Newsletter, join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.