FXPHD – HOU170 – Impact-Based Dust Volumetrics in Houdini

Download new video learning by FXPHD – HOU170 – Impact-Based Dust Volumetrics in Houdini | Taught by Bruno Ebe

Any great looking impact is supported by the crucial volumetric component. Getting volumetric clouds of dust and particulates moving and rendering correctly can often prove a challenging task for juniors and seniors alike. This course focuses on generating great looking volumetric dust based on impacts and preparing you to be able to adapt these types of simulations to art direction.

The course begins with preparing and optimizing the assets to ready them for fast iteration during the shot production process. It then dives into the often scary world of DOPs by building a smoke simulation network, which will allow you to both demystify and master the workflow. Great care will be taken in studying the crucial step of the volume sourcing emission. You will see how to avoid stepping, as well as inject as many details in the simulation right from the emission by extracting useful data from the RBD animation.

Collisions will be covered as well, and we will see how to visualize them correctly to troubleshoot any collider related issue. And velocity noise will be added separately to have finer control on our emission. Finally, we will further direct and complexify our simulation by layering forces thanks to DOP micro-solvers. To assist us in this task, we will build our own fields and use them as masks to precisely disturb or damp relevant parts of our simulation.

The important part of lighting and rendering will also be covered, using Mantra in this process. You will see how to use lights to shape the volume and reveal its finer details. Houdini’s Pyro shader for smoke is covered as well as learning how to extract useful information from lights and simulation fields to build AOVs, shadow passes, as well as technical passes for compositing.

From blocking the simulation to choosing the final render resolution, we will build and automate our workflow aiming at iteration speed, which is key in any shot production process. And because FX simulations can be very consuming and demanding on a studio’s infrastructure, especially when wedging parameters to find the right values, you will see how to optimize the data and cache only what is needed when it is needed. This will allow the artists to adapt them quickly to revisions and changes in the art direction.