VFX rendering of a Swisslos in a snow globe surrounded fir branches and red, lit candles.
Swisslos “Advent”
01.05.2015
Closeup of Heidi Klumm smiling and showing her wonderfull blond hair in her Schwarzkopf Drei Wetter Taft Ultimate commercial.
Drei Wetter Taft
01.02.2015

Houdini Water Drops

FLIP fluid-simulation of water drops falling in slow motion, creating crown-splashes around the hero-asset.

The drops were simulated and meshed in Houdini, cached as alembic and brought into Maya for lighting, shading and rendering in V-Ray. 

done at

Südlich-t

customer

Project Pitch

tools

Houdini FLIP-Fluids, Maya, V-Ray


Screencapture of the VDB-Fluid-Mesher HDA.

When meshing liquids, you often run into the problem of loosing detail/droplets when you smooth your VDB to get a cleaner, nicer surface. To prevent this from happening, I created a custom, droplet-preserving fluid mesher using volume-based smooth-masking. The particles are turned into a VDB, and are then deliberately eroded / smoothed to only enclose the large body of the liquid, leaving fine detail and droplets outside. This "mask-volume" is then used to mask the smooth operation during meshing. Everything inside the volume gets smoothed, everything outside (the droplets, fine detail) is not affected - thus, preserved. SideFX recently upgraded houdini's own particle-fluid-surfacer with functionalities similar to mine, making my HDA obsolete, but I'm still a bit proud that I was slightly ahead of them. 


VFX - Breakdown showing the particles, mesh and final render.

The red particle-spheres where added manually to the simulation to get some typical, round splash-droplets  to make the sim more belivable. Rendering high-resolution caustics also helped the shot and provided a extra layer of detail.