Hello everyone,
I'm trying to recreate this stunning concept art from Jodorowsky's Dune. The idea is just a ten second or so slow camera move with the gas spilling out out of the ship and freezing off into ice. The ship itself is done, but I am having a very difficult time getting the effect for the fluid/ice that I want with the tools that I have.




Mainly, I want to capture the process of the gas (I guess it would technically be a powder, since it's supposed to be Spice) slowly freezing and settling into long tendrils and sheets of ice/snow. The concept art does a fantastic job of illustrating the substance at different stages of crystallization (for instance in the left + bottom center of the cloud you can see it's turned into longer tendrils of hard ice, whereas to the right of the image it's still in a softer stage more akin to snow or a very thick gas).

I'm thinking all this means that at some point, my sim would have to go from a gaseous state to a solid, as well as have some stages in between? How long would it take for me (i've never used houdini before) to rig up that sort of effect?

Furthermore, is there an easy way to produce these fine fans of ice tendrils like on the upper left of the cloud? So far I have tried meshing an x-particles system in c4d, but it's not really giving me the level of control or fine detail I need (without setting the mesh density to a level that c4d can't handle).

What a gorgeous visual and what an awesome problem
I have no clear pointers, but I know you've come to the right software for the task!

Thinking about it, how about a pyro sim, but do not render the hot parts - only when the gas has cooled down? Or maybe not render even that, but use those areas to spawn particles? how you would get those to form nice rigid-ish crystalline structures I don't know.. Maybe some aggregation growth would work on that..

Anyway, good luck, and I'm eagerly awaiting what you come up with!

eetu
What a gorgeous visual and what an awesome problem
I have no clear pointers, but I know you've come to the right software for the task!

Thinking about it, how about a pyro sim, but do not render the hot parts - only when the gas has cooled down? Or maybe not render even that, but use those areas to spawn particles? how you would get those to form nice rigid-ish crystalline structures I don't know.. Maybe some aggregation growth would work on that..

Anyway, good luck, and I'm eagerly awaiting what you come up with!

Thanks My approach for the harder ice structures so far is this (c4d skinned x-particles emitting from geo) It looks OK - but the tendrils look a lot more chaotic and less elegant than in the reference. And also yeah, the issue with my approach before is that I was basically taking that mesh and sticking a TFD smoke sim on top of it, so everything was in a binary state - either solid or gas, which I think looses a lot of the subtlety and beauty of the concept art… it just looked like.. well smoke comped over geo.



So what would be advantage of rendering only the hot parts of a pyro sim rather than just using a smoke sim to begin with?