This past week, I worked on finalizing my idea and collecting references and assets. I also began testing different methods for getting all of the effects I want.

Reference

Video: Korea digital web art festa 2009 Bird Vfx

For this project, I was inspired by the video above that I found on Pinterest. I love the smoke within the bird and the particles flowing off the bird as it flies. 

Video: THU TV // ID ONE

Video: RnD Horse Sand Fume

Model

I found this free animated phoenix model on Sketchfab to use for the simulation.

I imported the phoenix model into Houdini with the FBX character import. I used a bone deform to get the animation, then I used a retime node to loop the animation for the full duration of my project (240 frames) since the original animation was only 80 frames.

Flipbook of bird animation

R&D

Since there are many ways to go about this project, I chose a few to test and see what works best. I found some tutorials online that implement the different aspects I want. One video I found on YouTube is called Simulate Swirly Smoke Tutorial - Houdini, which uses velocity fields based on the normals of the geometry and the billowy smoke shelf tool. Another tutorial I found called Houdini Tutorial - Wispy Smoke uses the billowy smoke shelf tool and POPS, although there is also a shelf tool for wispy smoke. 

The first method I tested was the velocity fields for a smoke simulation. My result wasn’t as good as the video, and it ran slow. I may go back and review the video again, but I think there are better ways to go about getting the result I want.

I tried experimenting with the wispy smoke shelf tool before watching the wispy smoke tutorial to see what I could do on my own first. The wispy smoke shelf tool setup is more complex than the billowy smoke setup, but the result I got from before the solvers are merged is a good starting point.

Flipbook of wispy smoke simulation

I’m struggling the most with having the smoke be contained within the bird geometry. What I understand from reading online is that I need to have the geometry as a collision source, which I haven’t gotten to work yet. In the flipbook above from the wispy smoke shelf tool, the dissipation is 1, which is the start of what I’m looking for. I’m also struggling with getting enough detail in the smoke, so I may need to adjust the solver settings or layer different smoke simulations. My goal for now is to find a way to keep the smoke contained in the bird geometry and keep refining the smoke simulation.