Hi! I am quite new to Houdini, have done some work in it but am still trying to grasp how the node system fully works and how different nodes do their jobs together. This aside, I surprisingly have found nearly NOTHING online about making a muzzle flash from a gun in Houdini. I am working on an animation project where I want to try to make the muzzle flashes as realistic as possible (I am quite proficient in Adobe After Effects, so I understand I could add it there, but that just isn't enough for me) How would I go about doing this? And if you can, try to explain to someone who is very new to Houdini, rather than just saying “oh go to x node and adjust the settings a bit”. Thanks for any help, and hopefully this can help add something online about this for others with the same question!

(I don't know if it makes a difference, but I am working mainly with assault rifles, and a couple handguns)

Adeptish
I want to try to make the muzzle flashes as realistic as possible

You shouldn't see any flash, just a bit of light, fast-dissipating smoke.
If there isn't strong backlighting and/or character movement I'd suggest cycling through prefab sims with instancefile…
If you have 3D tracked weapons, post a file with locked trails of the muzzle-points (with normal pointing along the barrel direction and stable upvector).

cpb

Adeptish
I want to try to make the muzzle flashes as realistic as possible

You shouldn't see any flash, just a bit of light, fast-dissipating smoke.
If there isn't strong backlighting and/or character movement I'd suggest cycling through prefab sims with instancefile…
If you have 3D tracked weapons, post a file with locked trails of the muzzle-points (with normal pointing along the barrel direction and stable upvector).

Sorry, I should have been more specific. I am doing a 3D animation in Cinema 4D, and rendering in Octane. I want some slow motion shots of the guns, and want to accurately simulate a volume to render of the muzzle flash. The whole project I am doing will be CGI.

Put some stock footage muzzle flash images on cards, and parent them to the barrel with a look at function, using the the screen's y axis as the up vector.

Thanks for all the replies, but I meant how would I achieve a muzzle flash using Houdini's pyro system.