I am back again! This month I am in my second Visual Effects class (VEF 2) and I wanted to share one of my projects with you. Our first project was to create fire or smoke from Maya fluids and then our second project was to create fire or smoke using Houdini Pyro. I decided to create fire in Maya and smoke in Houdini. They both came out ok looking but I liked my smoke more then my fire so this post will be centered around that.
So here it goes. Smoke. That was a nice challenge, I had to search for reference and recreate my smoke effect as close as possible to the reference. This in of its self is a challenge. But not only did I have to make this as close to the reference as possible but I had to do it in a program that I was not very familiar with, Houdini FX.
Back to reference. I looked up smoke reference on YouTube and found a video of someone creating fog out of dry ice and warm water. I took this video and chose a section from the footage to recreate. Here is a screenshot of said footage to give you an idea of what I was going for.
With my reference in hand I began with the dry ice primitive in Houdini and built from there. I adjusted the turbulence quite a bit to give it that rolling effect and messed with the opacity so that it look more cloud like. There was also a need to make sure that it dissipated and spread out so I upped the dissipation and found a fan field to apply. This field acted like wind coming from above and helped to spread the smoke out in all direction. With a slight angle added to the fan I was able to get a different effect that I liked better. It caused my smoke to start spreading in one direction and then when it had built up it spread out in every direction matching my reference better than I had hoped.
With the right effect I proceeded to create a Flipbook which is Houdini's version of a Playblast so that I could see what my effect would look like. Below is my final Flipbook of my effect so that you can get an idea what it looks like before render and later you can see what it looks like after render.
Liking my effect I then rendered it out. It was after the render that I saw a problem. My effect was far to thin. It needed to look thicker and needed a color applied so that I could sell the illusion of thickness by making the contrast between the black background greater. So the need for a second attempt came.
On my second attempt I had help from my lab instructor who showed me how to apply a cloud shader to my effect. With this new shader I then decided to completely recreate my effect only this time in a glass bowl to look even more like my reference. After that was all made, a Flipbook was created and then it was rendered so I showed it to my piers for their opinion between the two effects. It was unanimous, everyone liked the first better. Slightly discouraged I went back for a third attempt. But first here is an image of my second attempt. The final actually was much more opaque and thinner but it was about the same as what is below.
It was on this third attempt that I found success. I simply took my first effect with a shader applied and added some turbulence. This was then rendered out to be my final product. Which you can see below.
Before I go I wanted to show you my Maya fluids fire since I mentioned it above. I won't go into detail about how it was made but I hope you like what you see.
Rebecca Luse
