AI-assisted disclosure: Codex assisted with research, code and writing. Measurements, failure cases and limitations are retained from the original article.

Originally published by Alicia on 2026-10-19: Digital Garden by Alicia .

Start with the pretrained ML Volume Upres nodes, then train a small model only after the data and inference path work. On this workstation, the native billowy-smoke recipe produced valid 2× and 3× density volumes; the native training recipe also exported an ONNX model that could be run again through the same SOP. The interesting failures were mostly about field selection, environment setup and what a short training run can actually prove.

This is a cook log from Houdini 22.0.429 with a commercial license, OpenUSD 26.5, Windows 11, an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, 64 GB RAM and an NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti with 16 GB VRAM. The observed driver was 617.42. Training logs selected CUDA with PyTorch 2.9.0+cu130 in a separate recipe-managed Python environment.…