Water Magic
Water super powers! This piece was made using a combination of deformations in sops and flip and particle simulations in Houdini.
The main wave (wave 2) was created by rotating the mesh along a source point, with a falloff. The source point was animated to allow for the wave to travel forward and upward. A noise was then added to the falloff to give more shape to the wave.
​
The final wave being shot up at the end (wave 3) was made with a simple path deform.
​
The two meshes were used as attractors in a flip sim to guide the shape of the flip sim. To ensure the final flip mesh kept the fine details created in sops, the sop mesh was combined with the flip particles with a vdb combine and meshed together.
​
This is how the final flip mesh turned out! Wave 3 was upressed and given more details with an ocean spectrum applied. Bubbles were also scattered on the wave before the path deform.
​
An additional particle sim was added for the "shockwave" (wave 1) at the start of the shot. The particles were meshed from a vdb, with some points subtracted out to give it a bubbly look.
​
​
Plants in the lake were advected by the flip sim's velocity field in the vellum sim.
​
Leaves were also scattered on the lake and also advected by the flip sim, while ensuring they keep the same depth on the flip surface. This gave more detail in the water and gave a stronger indicator of the flip currents.
​
Finally, the trees were animated with a wire vellum sim. This animation was applied to 3 tree variations and instanced across the whole scene.
​
Whitewater waves 1 and 2 simmed separately with particles. The spray was rendered directly as particles in karma.
The same particles were also used to drive a mist sim, which were rendered as volumes using a material similar to a cloud shader.
​
Whitewater in wave 3 was also simmed similarly with particles. The particles were however rendered as a mesh instead, with transmission for a more watery, less aerated look.
​
​
The whole scene was rendered in multiple passes using karma (gpu).
Compositing was done in Nuke.