EmberGen Pyro

This test started as me trying to figure out Houdini’s Ragdoll setup. The Ragdoll is a bit of a twitchy mess with lots of popping and shaking. Maybe that’s what happens with a sim that has a lot of energy and not a lot of places for it to go.

Of course, this is a total rip of the Hulk/Loki scene from the 1st Avengers movies, but it was super fun to do.

The pyro was a bit of an after thought. I didn’t really spend that long on it, and it shows. It needs far more substeps, you can see the linear motion trails in some parts when the flaming fist is really moving.

I also really struggle a bit when it comes to getting real nice details out of EmberGen. I’m so used to Houdini’s nice Disturbance fields that add detail in the edges. But EmberGen is just so fast, it’s hard to walk away from it. It just gives you a lot of opportunity to really play around.

For whatever reason, this clip got a lot of traction on LinkedIn when I posted it. I think it’s mostly because of the lighting and rendering, which turned out a lot nicer than I though. I really leaned a lot on Houdini’s Karma renderer, which has nice volume shading with multiple scattering bounces. It doesn’t take much to get smokey fire to look nice. If anything I should have had the particles that are used to source the fire fade out a lot quicker.

I never posted this one. I got fairly far with it, but I wasn’t sure what else to do with it. Based on the Knight’s animation he should have really had a fancy last action that would get the fire to shoot out forwards, but I had trouble making that look cool. So I just rendered out the start of it to see how it would turn out. Wasn’t cool enough to put out on my socials, but I thought I’d post it here just for fun.