BEACH EXPLOSIONS AND GRAINS FX

In SideFX Software Houdini, I started by importing my assets, creating and laying out the environment and setting up a camera animation. Then, I created the drone animations by using curves and the path deform node, and created the car animations by simulating the car model using the RBD car rig and RBD follow path nodes. Then I moved on to importing the character animations and created several variations for the running, driving, and falling animations. Once I had all the animations in place, I created the ground deformation with a SOP solver and the intersect function. For the drone lasers, I started with a basic line, animated it using the carve node, and looped the animation with the Labs make loop node. I created a density attribute, which I then rasterised and copied onto points on the drones. For both the character ground dust and the car dust trail, I used a SOP solver and a POP network to create the base particle simulation, which I then rasterised and simulated with the pyro solver. Next came the vellum grains. I created a grains source from the deformed ground geometry, created an attraction weight attribute, and simulated the grains within a DOP network using the vellum solver. I also added the pyro simulations I created earlier and used them as an added velocity field for the sim. I also created a separate grains simulation for the impact from the drone lasers, and a smoke sim to accompany it. The last step was creating the explosions. I used the pyro burst source node to create two different variations and then simulated with the pyro solver. I then set up my Solaris render stage for Karma XPU, assigned some lights and split the scene into passes and AOVs.