This is my Final for VEF2, I decided to create a Meteor creating through the sky. Finding references I found a video of a real meteor crashing through the sky and it was gorgeous, It looked nothing like the movies; But I thought the effect would be even more difficult and I wasn't sure if people would noticeably know it was a meteor. I found a meteor effect made on Houdini and I thought it would be cool to make something like that.
I decided to use Houdini as my reference was created in Houdini, but I mostly wanted to learn more about Houdini fluids, and Houdini in general.
I looked for tutorials to help me on my way with the meteor, but I didn't find too many Houdini tutorials. That was a little off-putting because there were a lot of examples of Houdini meteors but not too much on how they made it. I managed though with a lot of experimenting.
I used knowledge that I learned from both Software Technology and Visual Effects 2 in order to create a nice looking meteor effect.
I created a fluid container and then I made the meteor a RBD object. I then pretty much adjusted the settings and nodes in Houdini. I really adjusted the Pyro node, Pyro Solver, and the Resize Fluid Container (several of the tabs inside of those).
I ran into trouble with getting the fire to look less like its leaving a motion trail, luckily the thicker smoke makes it less noticeable. I had some trouble making the smoke thicker in the render view as well; I made huge changes in the pyro node's density ramp and it helped me to get a thicker smoke.
Probably the most trouble I had in Houdini, was getting the way the smoke was lighted and shaded to appear in the Mantra Render. I got some subtle changes in the renderer, but it came with some extreme changes in the viewport. Also I may have needed to do some work in Nuke to replace the transparent meteor with one with a texture. I adjusted the bounding box, but I guess I didn't adjust it enough.
This is what my Final result looks like, and Im proud of how my meteor has turned out I think it looks really cool.
