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What Milad Sãvar explored
The 80 Level report, published by Emma Collins on 5 October 2026, describes procedural tests for controlling water adhesion, dripping, splashing and surface interaction on animated characters. Alessandro Cracolici is credited with the featured character animation. The reported work is a set of experiments, not a documented comparison showing that one method performed better than another.
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- Collision handling: custom VEX and a SOP Solver to address interaction with the animated character.
- Particle behavior: controls for adhesion to the body and for splash particles that drip away.
- Fluid and tension workflows: experiments involving POP Fluid and Gas Tension.
- Motion targets: custom VEX controls for velocity and position targets.
- Surface detail: noise sampled directly from the source.
- Finishing: post-processing intended to address visible gaps between particles.
The report says Sãvar shared a Houdini HIP file. Its current availability and terms are not established here, so the mention should not be taken as confirmation of a working download, tutorial, or license.
How to think about water sticking to a moving character
For this kind of effect, adhesion is only one part of the visual problem. Water needs to stay near the surface where desired, respond to the character’s changing pose, and then separate into drips or splashes when the motion and simulated forces call for it. Collisions, particle motion and surface tension therefore need to be considered together. The 80 Level report identifies these areas but does not give enough implementation detail to reproduce Sãvar’s result step by step.
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Houdini has multiple fluid workflows rather than one universal character-water recipe. SideFX’s Houdini 22.0 Vellum documentation describes fluids as particle-based and integrated with Vellum dynamics, with interactions that can include grains, cloth and soft bodies. Density, viscosity and surface tension help shape behavior. SideFX describes setup routes using shelf tools, DOP networks or SOP networks; a shelf setup is a starting point, not a finished simulation.
SideFX summarizes the role of tension this way: “Surface tension controls a fluid’s tendency to contract and create drops or tendrils.” That explains why tension matters for bead-like droplets and thin strands, but it does not by itself specify how to keep simulated water attached to an animated character.
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Choosing a workflow depends on the effect
SideFX distinguishes particle-based FLIP, which can produce splash-like fluid motion that travels through a scene, from volume-based fluid, which it characterizes as glue-like and confined to a container. This distinction can help orient a workflow choice, but it does not establish which solver Sãvar used for every test. The reported POP Fluid and Gas Tension experiments should not be conflated with SideFX’s separate MPM surface-tension comparisons.
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Why animated character boundaries are difficult
Water interacting with a moving character presents challenges beyond the visible surface effect. A 2019 paper by Minjae Lee, David Hyde, Kevin Li and Ronald Fedkiw, “A Robust Volume Conserving Method for Character-Water Interaction,” discusses volume loss and boundary-condition challenges in animated character-water simulations. Its proposed method uses a volume-of-fluid solver on a skinned tetrahedral mesh near the character, coupled to a standard Eulerian solver for bulk fluid. The authors report that the method supports effects including adhesion and anisotropic porosity.
This is a separate published research method, not a description of Sãvar’s Houdini setup. It provides useful context for why water-character interaction can be technically demanding: the boundary moves and deforms with the character, while the fluid should behave plausibly without unwanted volume loss.
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What the report does—and does not—establish
- It establishes that Sãvar explored several procedural approaches to water adhesion, dripping, splashing and particle gaps on animated characters.
- It does not provide a complete node-by-node recipe, a verified parameter set, benchmark figures or a fair side-by-side evaluation of the experiments.
- SideFX’s documented MPM speed and stability trade-offs describe MPM, not the performance of the artist’s individual tests.
- The academic character-water method offers technical context, but should not be attributed to the project.
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