PENNYWISE HEAD EXPLOSION FX

I wanted to create a project to practice blood FX in SideFX Software Houdini and landed on a cool scene from IT: Welcome to Derry to use as reference. I started by laying out a basic environment, mixing several character animations, and added a T-pose pre-roll for the cloth sim. I then moved on to prepping and simulating the cloth with the vellum solver. Next came the head explosion. I utilised the vellum solver again, this time using the edge fracture node to fracture the remeshed head geometry. I also added a basic brain asset inside the character's head and simulated it as a softbody. To keep the blast more art-directable, I split the simulation into two parts and switched between the animation and the simulation. I also created a secondary slime simulation using vellum grains, sourced from the edges of the original fractures, utilising vellum glue constraints. Then, I created a blood sim inside a DOP network using the FLIP solver, sourced from several FLIP sources. I added custom velocities for each source and also used a drag force. After that, I created a fog smoke sim, and used it as a velocity field to drive a POP network particle sim. Probably the most challenging part of this project for me was figuring out a way to deform the hair cards mesh. I decided to convert the mesh into custom curves and created an attribute to split the curves into two parts for each head blast. I then transferred the original piece attribute from the head fractures to the curves, and point-deformed them. To add a bit more life, I decided to simulate the curves as hair constraints with the vellum solver from a certain frame, and mixed between the original hair mesh and the simulated hair curves. Finally, I created an initial Solaris render stage for Karma XPU, set up some basic lighting, and added all the different elements.