The Easy Job

The particles system was made with some curl noise and some custom velocity.

Houdini

For The Easy Job, the short hinged around a gory effect of a character's body exploding. Houdini had released their MPM Solver in the 20.5 update. I had played around with it a bit, and I thought it would be a good tool for the job.

The initial effects was pretty easy to set up. You convert your object into MPM particles. Then I scattered a few points inside that geometry and I animated them expanding outwards. These would be the collision objects that would rip the body apart.

The trick is that you don't really want to render out your mesh as points/particles. You want to take that movement and convert it into your mesh moving around. Luckily for me, SideFX released a Masterclass that showed a way to do just that. It demonstrated how you could use MPM to simulate a building breaking with particles, and then applying those results back to the mesh.

It's a pretty slick solution, so I applied that to my character. At first, you can see the shell of the mesh with the same movement as the particles.

Then I converted the particles to VDB's, eroded them, and then converted them back to a mesh for the fleshy interior bits.

After that, I used the areas where the particles separated as the source for a Vellum Fluid sim. This would be the blood for the effect.

It took a good half day to create the effect, but I was happy with the final result.

Houdini was also used to simulate TwinBlast's jacket, the wires coming out of his missing arm and the occasional sparks that come from his arm.

I had to use Alembic caches for the gore explosion and the wires to get the detailed bits into Unreal. I usually try to export out FBX's (I was able to do that for the cloth simulation) since they are so much lighter and responsive in Unreal.