But some details like the wand obstructing particle visibility won't matter so much, It will matter more where people are looking, what is more interesting, To consider the details on that, Than to consider things that may pass quickly or things that may not be noticed at all.
The more you do (carefully considering what is needed and not), the more realistic it will look. So you'd make a rendering of the particles with the animation of a black (shadeless) wand and you'd use the resulting “mask” to layer atop “you” with your real wand and off-stage lighting. And if you have a wand in your hand, you have to consider how the wand may obstruct the particles, So you have to produce a rendering of the wand for the purpose of obstructing the particle visibility. Like if you are working some magic and you shoot flickery stuff from your fingers,there is more to it than getting flickery particle effects, you have to have a similarly colored light off-stage to you, lighting in sync to the particle effects so you appear to be lit by the particles. Another thing to learn about is the use of Z-buffers in post-production compositing. Sometimes when doing animations, to save on rendering times things that are not seen are either removed or not created at all. So it's probably best to improvise with what you see than what you think you are seeing, and to also consider what you aren't seeing. My big epiphany in college was that most effects in films are post-production 2D layered effects not too much 3D. There are also the legacy tutorials on odforce : Check the examples in the H9 doc also, when you middle-click on the nodes in the network view, there are some explanations (most of the time). However dynamics (well, the dynamic operators, because particles are a bit separate) is the most advanced part of houdini imho, so you may want to check other tutorials to get to know the interface and the concepts, before diving into dynamics. Digital tutors has an introduction to dynamics as well. (I'm guessing you want to do particles too) Gnomon ( ) has an in-depth dvd on rigid body dynamics, once again for H8, but it applies to H9. The last two recent ones cover the fluid/gas solver and are a bit advanced, don't start with these! There's also the “working with particles” pdf, which is for H8, but is easy to apply to H9. Welcome Apex, Still kind of a newbie myself since I started using Houdini a couple of months ago, but I'm getting the grasp of it! For dynamics specifically, there are a couple tutorials in the learning/tutorials section here, “houdini 9 dynamics”, “avalanche previsualization”.