Getting Started

Install the asset

Grab JV-Advanced_Velocity-vX.Y.hdalc from your Gumroad library.

Windows — C:\Users\<you>\Documents\houdini22.0\otls\
macOS — ~/Library/Preferences/houdini/22.0/otls/
Linux — ~/houdini22.0/otls/

If the folder doesn't exist yet, create it.

Or use Assets ▸ Install Digital Asset Library to pick it up without restarting.

The node then appears in the SOP tab menu under JV ▸ Advanced Velocity.

Updating

When a new version arrives, delete the previous .hdalc file before adding the new one — two files defining the same asset will collide. The internal node type never changes between versions, so your existing scenes pick up the new version automatically. Nothing to relink.

The two modes

The Mode menu at the top is the first thing to understand about this node:

Timed Events (the default) — the output is a sequence of baked velocity events, each captured from the setup at a frame and faded in and out by its own envelope. The setup you edit is a template; nothing reaches the output until you press Create Event. This is the headline feature — see Timed Events.
Single Field — the setup is evaluated live and written straight to the output. What you tweak is what you get, every frame, like an ordinary SOP.

If all you want is one velocity field with no time axis, switch to Single Field and everything below responds immediately.

Your first velocity

Drop an Advanced Velocity node after any geometry.
Set Mode to Single Field.
Open Basic Velocity in the Setup tab and tick its header checkbox.
Set Value to something like 0, 5, 0.

That's it — the node now outputs @v, and the viewport shows red guide trails pointing the way the points will travel. Feed it into a POP, FLIP, Vellum or RBD solver.

Velocity you already had is safe

A fresh node passes the incoming velocity through — the Incoming Velocity stream in the mixer is on by default, so dropping this node after a cache or a previous sim layers on top of that motion instead of erasing it. Switch that toggle off when you want to author the attribute outright.

The speeds size themselves to your object

Velocity is in units per second, so a default that suits a one-unit test sphere is nearly invisible on an 80-unit building. The first time you connect geometry the node measures it and scales the world-space speeds — Basic, Directional, Exploding, Curl and the speed clamp — to match, rounding to something readable rather than leaving 118.6034 in a field.

Only parameters still sitting at their default move, so nothing you've already dialled in gets touched, and it happens once rather than on every reconnect. Measure Input Scale (the tape measure in the Setup row) tells you what it measured and what it set.

The shape of the node

Along the top: Mode, the Group the final write is restricted to, and (in Timed Events) the Dynamic Events section holding the event list.

Below that, two tab strips:

Setup | Velocity Mixer — the six velocity types, each a collapsible section with a checkbox in its header, and the mixer that decides how the enabled types get combined.

Output | Visualization | Utilities — what leaves the node and under which name, the viewport guides and event timeline, and the utility toggles plus links to these docs, Discord and YouTube.

Output and Visualization each split again inside: Output into General | RBD Sim | Ballistic Motion, and Visualization into General | Velocity Types | Timed Events | Timeline HUD. Worth a glance before you go hunting for a control — the tabs are how a node with six hundred parameters stays findable.

The version you have installed is shown at the very bottom of the parameter list.

A quick explosion

Fracture something — a Voronoi Fracture into an Assemble with Create Packed Geometry on is the usual setup.
Drop Advanced Velocity after it, set Mode to Single Field, and switch on Exploding Velocity.
Leave Origin on Whole Object.

Every piece now flies away from the object's centre. Already looks pretty decent. To blast from a specific spot instead, switch Origin to Point Source and place the location right in the viewport with the interactive state. And when one explosion isn't enough — a lift, then a blast, then a spin — that's exactly what Timed Events is for.