Houdini

nebulae in houdini

I’ve been very, very busy, which is a lame excuse for the lack of posting new things, but there you have it.

Much of my work time recently has been dedicated to building inky, nebula-like effects in Houdini. Generally speaking, when you’re trying to make that whole ink-in-water effect, you dust off your copy of 3DS Max, do a quick fluid simulation, advect a bunch of particles through it, and then cache out a bazillion partitions of your simulation with different random seeds, then render in Krakatoa. Well, I have none of those things, and I needed greater control over the simulation than what can typically be achieved in Fume/Krakatoa, so I tried to do it in Houdini. I definitely have a lot of respect for the Krakatoa renderer after a week spent on this effect. This stuff is hard! Hit the jump to see exactly how I went about this…

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