Houdini VFX (Smoke)

VFX_04_apowell1.mp4

Smoke Em' If You Got Em'

First flip book animation ported from Houdini to Unreal? Success! Time to relax! Read below how I broke this process down.

Table of Contents

Reference Summary

I wanted to mix between a regular tank smoke and burst from the barrel and add a tracer rounds in addition, so the user could actually see where the round was headed before making impact.

https://www.northwoodshumidors.com/cigar-blog/how-long-does-it-take-to-smoke-a-cigar

https://gifer.com/en/gifs/smoke

Overview

The main goal was to get inside of Houdini and play around with it for the first time. Here, you'll see how the shape and form is oddly configured due to the layer choice. I added a mountain node that deforms over time.

Add The Clouds

Next the Pyro Source and Volume nodes were added to give condensed voxel sizes, as well as the cloud look.

Makin' Smoke

Adjusting the Pyro Solver node was the fun part, and pretty simple! I fine-tuned the parameters until I had a look that I liked.

Animation Time

After I had the effect, I navigated to the output tab, plugged in all of the rendered frames and created a mosaic that would become my texture inside the engine.

Material

From the texture, I created a material and plugged the alpha channel into the opacity of the material. For visual purposes, the alpha mask is not actually being shown on the material below.

Sub UV

Lastly, I created a new particle system with an emitter than contained a Sub UV Animation and a scale parameter that allowed me to match the size of an object I wanted to attach the effect to. Finally, I told the engine that the sprite sheet was an 8x8.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed working with Houdini, although I was a bit hesistant at first. I think the effect turned out much more realistic than I originally thought as well. I excited to continue learning and using the new software!

VFX_04_apowell1.mp4

Resources

Environment: https://www.fab.com/listings/4da78da6-44b3-4adf-8883-219fe17b44d4

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