For the second project of Visual Effects 2 we got to go back to Houdini to create a fire effect different than the one from week 1, which we used Maya for. This week I decided to create a fireball based off of the Mario fireball. This was the reference I used.
The biggest struggle was having to deal with the simulation times as well as finding out which settings translated over from Maya and where they could be found. The effect itself is called Smokeless Flame in Houdini. The setting I altered the most were the ones under the Shape tab in the AutoDopNetwork (Dissipation, Disturbance, Turbulence, and Confinement).
I changed the color of the fire in the shop network of the smokeless flame. Under the various color tabs, there is an artistic tab. This is where I went specifically because this is the ramp you want to change that directly effects the color how you would expect it (Physical is based on the temperature and can take quite sometime, especially if you are not trying to recreate something 1:1 in the real world. Adjusting the color was particularly fun because the flame was so stylized, it was not as uniform as a normal flame. It jumped from red, to white, to orange, back to white, and so on, because of this I made a lot of color shifts really close to each other on the artistic color ramp.
Speaking of stylized, this was not only one of the coolest features of this project, but also one of the biggest challenges because it was harder to find real life reference that accurately represented the Mario fireball. After searching I did find one reasonable reference for shape and motion, and that was a flaming arrow. While still on the bow, the flaming tip was the closest thing to the shape I could think of.
For the Mario model, I posed him in Maya to match the reference. I had to mix and match face shapes by deleting geometry in the mesh because the blend shapes did not work, this process was quite interesting and almost felt like a puzzle because I had to use the happy eyes and the angry mouth to get the look of the reference.
Another big part was the bringing in the textures into Houdini, in comparison to Maya, Houdini’s process seems like there are a bit more hoops to jump through because I had to export different parts of my mesh as a piece because those pieces shared a texture, instead of bringing in the whole mesh in at once. Though through the shop network I was finally able to apply the textures onto the geometry.
After rendering in Houdini, I switched over to Nuke to make some final adjustments. While doing test renders in Houdini, I kept the brightness below 1, because 1 would always yield a blown out image of the fire. I did this in post because I did not want to render the whole video with a lowered brightness because Mario would have looked too dark. Had I rendered the effect and the model separately, the reflections in Mario's eyes would be lost. So for me the best method was to roto out Mario in Nuke and only apply the lower brightness to the fire. I'm sure there are many ways to go about getting to the same result, just like how you can make a fire in Maya or Houdini, and that's what makes these programs and this industry so much fun.
Moment of truth, which program do I prefer for fire. It would have to be Maya, and thats probably a bit bias because I've spent more time with the program, but if you want to take projects further with animation and textures and sound, Maya seems to do all that stuff much more efficiently than Houdini. Though I will say for my next project, I also used Houdini, and I learned a lot more about animation and texturing in the program so I can't wait to share that with you all.
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