Dear all,

I have been always fascinated movies like Star Trek and the beautiful space scenes. The volumetric nebulae, realistic galaxies, dust clouds, surfaces of the sun, etc…

Would you please help me to get to the right track. Where/how to start learning such effects? Have you seen any good publications and links on this topic?

For example, I especially like this sun's surface shot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOErr4xntHE&feature=related [youtube.com]

It is 6:12sec long movie, and to know what I mean, please fast-forward to 1:30sec. You will see there a 6-second sequence of beautiful fluid sun's surface simulation.

Is Houdini the right tool for such type of effects?

Any advice will help. Thank you.

Hey

Theres this really good book from 3ds max called deconstructing the elements (http://www.amazon.com/Deconstructing-Elements-Third-Edition-Entertainment/dp/0240521269) [amazon.com] you can actually find a downloadable version of it now but you can use this just as a starting point.

Also you should check out the end credits for Thor, they do a great job at creating these types of effects. If you break it down you can see that the clouds that they used simple cloud formations which is doable in Houdini.

Hopes this helps in the slightest.

Also if you havent seen it yet, I think this would be some really good inspiration.

https://vimeo.com/39822385 [vimeo.com]

zak

Hi Zdimaria,

the link you provided me with was absolutely fantastic. The effects have been achieved with 3DS Max and relatively new Plug-in called Krakatoa.

I am aware of the capabilities of Krakatoa.

I would like to see something like that done in Houdini. I think, Houdini, which is a tool specifically designed for particles, should overcome even such a beautilful scenes as the one you showed me.

Kind regards,
Bunkai

In the Advanced RenderMan Book, Rob Bredow has a chapter in there on how they constructed the Eagle Nebula for the movie Contact in the mid 1990's. A real good read, quite dated but still interesting to see how they approached the effect driven by actual images as textures. Texturing particles rendered as sprites. They tried to use an early method of Volume ray marching but in the mid 1990's, the compute horsepower just wasn't in place to do this for the Eagle nebula fly-through on the movie Contact (as describe in that chapter from the book).

These days, you could most certainly apply the same basic technique driving things by real images (from the NASA website?) but instead of sprites, substitute the various methods of constructing volumes in Houdini. You can construct the gaseous structures by constructing/sculpting volumes in SOPs, as point clouds and use the Mantra Volume Procedural with a CVEX shader to read the point cloud to construct the volumes, and on and on.

There are lots of threads on the Houdini and OdForce forums on volumes and rendering of volumes and volumes constructed from points/particles, many with example files.

Those Star Trek movies are classic along with the openings of Voyager and Next Gen. Still impressive after all these years. The genesis effect in Star Trek II is still a classic. Alvy Ray Smith.

http://alvyray.com/Papers/CG/StarTrekII_GenesisDemo.pdf [alvyray.com]

Dated no doubt, but for the time, unfreakingbelievable.

I helped generate the background nebulae for Eve Crucible (mmpog):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXFuMyuWFDU [youtube.com]

These were done with volume primitives and lots of shader work in Houdini 10. There is some detailing from matte painting but the images are 95% from Houdini. The render times were long but there were a lot of things that could have been optimized.

I'll paraphrase some advice I gave elsewhere:
When shading nebulae it's important to note that they are typically one of three types, or mixture of them:

Emission nebula - these are transparent but emit light through ionization.

Absorption nebula - what it sounds like, dark nebula that block light. Some nebulae will have an emission front ahead of the edges of the molecular dust that absorbs the light. The key to this effect is to make sure your volume opacity is colored, towards a reddish / brownish tint (or the compliment), in order for it to redden objects behind it (note: colored opacity seems to be broken using stochastic transparency in H12).

Reflection nebula - reflect light from nearby stars. These can normally be treated like regular fog, although they really behave more like the atmosphere of the earth, where Raleigh scattering makes them appear blue-ish. Usually no shadowing is needed for these.

Mix these together in one scene to get space telescope style images.

You can create a volume primitive for emission and another for absorption, and just pipe them into your shader as parameters of the same name. The emission volume would receive but not cast shadows, and the absorption volume would be dark and a shadow caster. For a typical Hubble-esque image you can shrink the absorption volume slightly to create the halo effect. For reflection nebulae you can treat them much like standard smoke or dust.

HTH,
jon

Nice Tips!!!

Thank you Jparker!!!

Just came across this new training video from cmivfx: http://www.cmivfx.com/tutorials/view/504/Houdini+3D+Galaxy+Creation+Effects [cmivfx.com]

It looks really good for this!

I just had a look at the CMIVFX video. It's really good. It's more stylistic than realistic. Also, it's definitely not a Houdini beginner-level video.

You might wanna get it just because it's almost exactly what you are asking about! However, it goes at a fast clip; so, you might wanna check out some more introductory stuff first if you have never worked with Houdini. (like the First Steps videos on this website) just my .02


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