For a future project I spent this day in Houdini 21 building a procedural plume from scratch. I swapped the standard emitter for a simple custom VEX-driven velocity burst to get that specific "explosion from center" look.

The flip solver was set to FLIP (Splashy) to get those crisp, high-velocity droplets and I finished it off with a MaterialX gold shader in Solaris.

Who says you can't be an alchemist in 2026?