Visual Effects 2 (VEF2)
Lesson 2: Houdini Pyro
(Yea, not sure what's up with the Jim Carrey references this month)
My Video:
This was a tricky project, Houdini is still fairly new
to me and it's still scary to step into every time.
This time I decided to do smoke instead of fire, Maya
sort of drained me of staring at a fire every day.
Specifically I wanted to make dry ice, the flowing water like
effect of smoke.
It was fun to make, and not as hard as I thought it might've been.
I did however run into a fun issue of Houdini not accepting
textures correctly, causing my renders to be horrid eye sores.
So it ended up being just a nice black and white video.
I thought it added to the spooky effect personally.
Research:
For this project I decided I wanted
to try smoke rather than fire this time; just to work with different settings
and movement. After looking around at what type of smoke effect to do, that
wouldn’t also need a fire with it, I decided that it’s Halloween time, why not
do some ‘spooky’ dry ice effects.
It wasn’t really hard to find video
and photo reference of dry ice, its all the same very heavy almost liquid
flowing over the container. I also think keeping it light and wispy might be a
challenge too.
Another challenge I’m going to have
to put some thought into it’s the flowing direction, most the things we do,
with smoke and fire, flow up. Dry Ice; however, flows up and then back down,
while forming around the shape of its container.
So coming back, getting the feel of
the wispy light smoke turned out to be fairly easy, however it’s taking a few
trial and errors to get it to flow like I want. I thought maybe keying its
direction would work. It would flow up to the lip and then right back down into
the cauldron; it wouldn’t flow out and over the edges. Asking for help, it was
suggested that I just make the shape over the cauldron and slightly larger than
the cauldron lip. I wouldn’t have the flowing up and out motion like originally
planned, but it would for it to flow down and around the object.
It worked, it now flows down about half
way before dissipating off into the air, the spooky effect I was looking for.
Now I need to set up lighting and texturing to really set a good feel to the
whole thing.
References:
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