Hey all,

Just wondering if anyone has done something like this before, trying to get a flat looking dust/smoke effect, similar to this (around 64s)



I'm thinking this might have been done by hand drawing shapes and either hand animating or simulating them through the frame. But I was wondering if you could get anything similar out of a simulation. Possibly by converting to geometry and post-processing it somehow?

The good looking stuff is typically hand drawn, but you can create these shapes procedurally so that they hold up quite well.

Check out this "anime water" tutorial for inspiration, it's for Blender, but the principle in Houdini is exactly the same (for the the way they created the foam patterns):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZsfr5f273c [www.youtube.com]

Dust, fire, etc can all be done like this.

Ah, that's awesome, I'll check it out thank you.

I guess it's just figuring out the best noise patterns to create the shapes that you want.

gnisbet
Ah, that's awesome, I'll check it out thank you.

I guess it's just figuring out the best noise patterns to create the shapes that you want.

One way could be to create a smoke sim and render it traditionally, then use a trace sop at different threshold settings to generate the outlines.

jsmack

gnisbet
Ah, that's awesome, I'll check it out thank you.

I guess it's just figuring out the best noise patterns to create the shapes that you want.

One way could be to create a smoke sim and render it traditionally, then use a trace sop at different threshold settings to generate the outlines.

Thanks really much for the tip. It actually produced some pretty cool results.

For those looking to do this in the future, to get it back into camera space you need to transform the trace by 0.5 in both x and y. Then in a point vop drop down a fromndc and move the trace from camera space to world space. The z distance sets how far from the camera to place it.