Hi all,

I'm fairly new to Houdini so bear with me if I don't use the “Houdini lingo” yet.

I'm looking into creating a tendril like smoke trail similar to what is used in the EA logo animation for Dragon Age 2. For your convenience here's a link to a youtube video of that specific logo animation:

Dragon Age 2 Destiny Trailer [youtube.com]

I'm talking about the first 3-4 seconds of the logo animation where the smoke looks kind of like tendrils getting sucked into the EA logo.

If anybody has some pointers, tips and or hints as to how to achieve such an effect I would be very grateful.

It looks to me like a combination of two sims:
1) normal smoke sim played normally for the first second with smoke streaming outwards.

2) played in reverse:
smoke sim sourced from curves (L-system or exponential 2D noise pattern (just a high contrast noise pattern… extreme gamma curve) with a radial mask). Also fairly low diffusion so that smoke does not travel very far from the source.

See if you can capture that logo animation, convert it to frames and play it backwards - it should show you that the animation for the tendrils has been reversed.

As for the technical details, do a search for “ink” and “million particles” and “delayed load”.

Thanks for your quick reply.

I had a busy week and things are slowing down to normal again so I can spend more time looking into tackling this effect.