Magical Energy Beam - Houdini & Nuke VFX Course

Welcome to a new Houdini Course: Magical Energy Beam

In this course we are going to create this entire VFX shot from start to finish with Houdini, Nuke & Redshift!

Volumetric Clouds

We're going to start in Houdini by creating the clouds using geometry as a base, and then we will use Volume VOPs to remove density, twist and deform our volumes to animate the clouds.

Particle Shockwave

For the shockwave effect we're going to create a pyro simulation and use the velocity to drive our particles.

For the particles, we're going to look into different ways to modify the velocity advection to create a more unique and magical look.

I'm also going to show you some quick and easy ways to create more interesting colors with a lot of detail.

Volumetric Fog

For the fog we're going to create custom noise patterns that we can layer together to get a more realistic result.

Here we'll also go over the best way to optimize our render by splitting the fog into separate parts.

Beam FX

Finally we will create the energy beam with some simple volume manipulation.

Terrain Creation

As a bonus I also cover the creation of the terrain inside Houdini and Substance Painter.

Rendering - Redshift

In the rendering section we will separate all of our components in separate layers.

We're going to create individual light setups for everything, set-up all the materials render passes, and render everything using Redshift.

Nuke

In nuke we will bring all of our renders and start putting everything together.

We will separate the AOVs for each layer so we can have complete control over the final output.

We're going to cover various topics such as using expressions to automate animations, creating and adding 3d elements to our shot, and a bunch of general tips and tricks you can use in any project.

Downloads

You will have all the geometry, assets & textures required included with the downloads.

The download archive also include the completed Houdini project file (ver. 19.5) and Nuke project file (ver. 13.2v4) - Please note that the Nuke project file is with the Indie version