Bottom line, I do freelance work in Houdini, mainly particles sims and smoke sims – user-ready setups, and I am available for collaboration or projects. As a next interest area of the focus for me would be 3D integration (integrating all mentioned effects in real footage for a film). I hope that I can share later on some awesome results with similar quality as the Hero Clouds project.

I will not go forward without mentioning extraordinary people that helped me and are contributing a lot in order to teach others: Saber Jlassi, whom I consider my friend and mentor, and Saul Espinosa – great technical details from “A to Z”.

Learning Houdini

I am still learning a lot, and I know a little bit about other 3D applications. But from what I am seeing so far in this industry (info, tutorials, RND, new releases), I am planning on sticking with Houdini for a very long time, hopefully, forever. You can do everything with Houdini – oh well, I need to use camera tracking outside of Houdini for my upcoming project, maybe will see this tool in Houdini as well in the future.

The additional strength is that if you want to improve your time management and increase the overall work effectiveness, then Houdini is the right way. I will put together some very useful tutorials links at the end of the article, which I consider “100% must watch no matter what”.

As when I started, it was 3 years ago, when I did some research about some CG explosions and I came across some amazing renders. It was Houdini, then I was starting to “investigate”, what is Houdini. I have read a lot in the forums and articles, where people were complaining that Houdini is node-based, 180 turn from the other apps out there like 3dsmax, Cinema4, etc., needs years of a steep learning curve and so on. Considering this and seeing prior the renders, I considered that this is the app for me, so I jumped in. I can confirm that indeed at the beginning it is quite hard to follow the logic, but after several months, all made perfect sense. After 3 years I am still finding difficult some parts, but everything comes like a glove for the things I experienced.

As a conclusion, I am very happy that I chose Houdini. The community is also great, and this makes it even better. Congratulations, Houdini Team.

Gathering the Reference

Indeed, the clouds are awesome. You can also take a look at them in the Gumroad VDB Clouds Pack Link.