Scorched Tires - Car Fire FX

This personal project focused on Pyro FX that I created and simulated within Houdini. My goal was to achieve a sense of realism, and Houdini’s powerful simulation tools were essential in making that possible. The flexibility provided by gas microsolvers allowed me to fine-tune the behaviour of the fire and smoke, giving me precise control over the final look. Combined with Houdini’s node-based workflow, I was able to quickly iterate and experiment with different setups. The sequence was rendered in Mantra, with additional AOVs exported to give me extra flexibility during the compositing stage.

Alongside the pyro work, I built the environment using Quixel Megascans assets, which I laid out entirely inside Houdini. Leveraging Houdini’s proceduralism made this process far more efficient than manually placing each asset. Once rendered, I brought everything into Nuke for compositing, where I refined the look and integrated all the elements together. I constantly moved back and forth between Houdini and Nuke throughout the project, as I find that this workflow lets me choose the most efficient approach for each task, for example, spending just seconds solving something in Houdini that might otherwise take much longer in Nuke. This iterative process between the two tools was essential in shaping the final piece.