Snow Simulation Workflows in Houdini

Vellum Simulation Techniques with Diego de Mendizabal

Learn how to use Vellum in Houdini to simulate professional-quality snow interactions. This 6-hour workshop is created for intermediate-level artists looking to expand their FX skills. Diego de Mendizabal, a Lead/Senior FX TD at Sony Pictures Imageworks, demonstrates how to use Vellum to simulate snow and shares Pyro and POP tips and tricks for generating secondaries, and briefly touches on Solaris, Karma, and Houdini's own compositing tools for shading and rendering snow. 

Artists will learn tips and techniques to art-direct snow simulations using constraints and attributes.By completing the workshop, artists will develop a solid grasp of how to use Vellum and its tools to create snow/mud/sand simulations with an iterative, art-directable approach. Diego also talks through typical problems that artists may encounter, how to troubleshoot and solve them, and ways to optimize the setup for minimal data and simulation time footprints. 

In the second half of the workshop, Diego teaches how to set up and add secondary elements to the main simulation to enhance its appearance and gain more control over it. He then covers how to shade and render these elements in Houdini's lighting toolkit, Solaris, as well as how to set up Karma renders and use its live viewport rendering capabilities.To make this workshop easily accessible to artists, everything is built in Houdini, including all assets used (minus the featured free-to-use .hdr light probes), so there will be no need to use other content creation packages or download separate models and files. Project files for this workshop are provided by Diego as an additional learning resource.