My First Steps With Houdini - Pyro FX

This week I finally got my hands on Houdini after hearing so much about it for so long. At first glance it looks fairly complicated but it doesn't take too long to get used to the workflow.

To start with I decided to go for an obvious feature of the program - Pyro FX. Here are the results of my experiments:

For this experiment I had taken influence from the fairies in the recent short film 'Majora's Mask: Terrible Fate'. They had a sort of smoky glittery effect behind them which I really liked the look of so I decided this would be a good test for the 'billowy smoke' effect in Houdini. Getting the smoke to work with the speed of the fairy was a bit of a challenge to a newcomer but I soon got the hang of it (much to my processor's dismay) - Substeps are key. There are a few issues with bounding box size as my computer was taking a very long time to process larger bounds. Overall I'm pretty happy with this as a technique and I feel with refinement I could get some really cool effects.