Car Dust Trail and Suspension Rig - HOUDINI FX + BREAKDOWN

TUTORIAL: • Houdini Pyro Simulatio...
Hello folks! Happy to present you my newest project which I've been working in the past couple months.
This time I wanted to create a shot of a car driving up in the desert. Could learn a lot about RBD suspension setups as well as dust trails, terrain creation, Karma XPU and Solaris.
Wrapping up this year and completing my 6 months journey of Houdini with this. Excited to keep learning and creating!
Created with Side FX Houdini, rendered with Karma XPU, comped in After Effects.
Total frames: 300 (24fps) with 3 different cameras
Cache Size: 453GB
Render Time: ~80 hours
Camera AR and res: 2.79 - 2048x858
HQ: vimeo.com/8985...
Car model by Delta Force Black Hawk Down Remake
(downloadfree3d...)
Song: • Energising Game Sport ...
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HARDWARE:
- AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
- NVIDIA Galax RTX 4090
- XPG 128GB RAM (4x 32gb)
- ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming 4
- Power supply EVGA 1000W Gold

[@raneemFX]

Wow one of the best , The details are 😲

[@guiolidmp]

Que projeto INSANO BRUNÃO!! Mandou muito, parabéns 👏

[@henrythejeditube]

so realistic, Bruno, wow

[@FremorXXX]

It really stands out from the picture that the wheels are not in motion blur

[@brunohmerli]

Yeah, actually... Nothing really is in motion blur. I did this project also to learn a bit about Solaris and Karma XPU. As I did it in H19, I couldn't manage to properly get motion blur to work without render times going crazy high... So I rendered without any motion blur and tried to apply it in post, but After Effects motion blur is not that great 🥲 Nowadays I'm using Redshift and Nuke, so problably this project would look way better and with proper motion blur

[@zurasaur]

My friend, use a vector pass with rsmb pro vectors effect in AE You can get very realistic moblur in post. It’s based on the motion vectors with no added render time 😅

[@brunohmerli]

@@zurasaur Yes friend, I did tried that. But in this project I couldn't get vector pass to render. Houdini was crashing everytime I was enabling it... Anyway, it was good learning. I'm using Redshift now and it's way simpler imo, I'm having a great time with it 😊

[@facundogalante5571]

Awesome!

[@MaiwaldFilms]

Nice Karma rendering :)

[@guitoma109]

Show! Belíssimo trabalho

[@GuilhermeSouza-bs5wp]

🔥🔥🔥

[@yehonataniiii]

Insane

[@SuperPhotoReal]

Nice work! 👌

[@shaunramkelawon]

so good!

[@paul_colton]

Very nice work! Any sort of (paid even) tutorial on this would be amazing!

[@brunohmerli]

Thank you! Maybe one day... Tbh most of the stuff I did here is based on already known tutorials. Just stacking knoledge

[@toannguyenthe5791]

@@brunohmerli let make a tutuorial bro! you has a amazing project!!

[@unrealengine5900]

amazingggg

[@francescost7860]

Hi Bruno, fantastic work! I would like to know how you approached the impact particle simulation. Are they POP grains? Did you do some advection on the wheels to make the pops follow the rotation on the wheels? What about the streaks/trails, is it just clumping? Did you use just one emitter for everything? Thanks a lot!

[@brunohmerli]

Hey, thank you! The grains on the wheel are actually not grains... Just a bunch of particles to make it look like so. I did it by emitting a popsim in the spinning wheel. The problem was that my wheels were way too fast. I've tried emitting dusts to advect, tried creating my own vel fields around the wheel... No sucess. So I ended up locking the wheel in the Z axis (in my case) and emitting on a almost-not-moving wheel (just with the left/right/up/down movement and spinning) and in the popnet I added winds to fake the speed. I had no idead what I was doing, not that happy with the result, but worked for me in this project. Today probably I could come up with something better. The streaks/trails I did by setting a emitter are from the ground by proximity with the wheels, changed up the velocity vectors on those points to be going away from the car, and up. Animated the velocity length by hand - when the car has more "impact" I just boosted up the velocity. (3 months later I've made a procedural setup for this, with better results, but that's something for later :D) Feed them in a popsim, emitting just 10-30 particles on the sourcing, and used popreplicate on these to create the trail. Then setup a pyrosim with this popsim as emitter ;) And about the emitters... It is mainly two (ground and wheels), but I had to personalize the emitting amount and velocities for each layer I've added. For exemple, I had 2 or 3 smoke simulations that I stacked together - same with particles. Each of these with their own emitter setup, but mainly from ground or wheel.

[@sungerbob1786]

hello bruno. congrats. did you achieve the car rig with rbd cone twist constraints?

[@brunohmerli]

Thanks! For the wheels, yes. Also some soft constraints for suspension

[@marcelarizzo7272]

😱🔥🔥🔥 lindo

[@brunohmerli]

obrigado meu amô 💗💗💗

[@韩健-y8o]

amazing short bro ,can i have your this hip file , im doing some grain stuff ,but i have no idea with wheel divering gain. i very love your grain motion, please. or can you suggest some turtorial of the driving grain. my english is not good. so , i have respect , you know. peg

[@brunohmerli]

Hey, unfortunately I can't provide the hip file. By "grain" you mean the particles spinning in the front wheel? Or the dust trail itself?

[@Himelyt266]

​@@brunohmerli wheels and ground partic9sand

[@brunohmerli]

@@Himelyt266 I guess there's many better ways to do it, but for the sand on the wheels I found better to do it with the wheel NOT moving forward. I simulate the particles with the wheel only spinning, with wind forces to fake the forward motion, and then transfer this to the moving wheels. It's kinda tricky, but that's what worked for me

[@himelgraytv1194]

Hey , this is mind blowing , please tell me all your learning path , what courses u took to learn houdini , I am new and struggling to learn houdini ,

[@brunohmerli]

Thank you. I took like 2 very beginner online courses from Brazil that helped me get to know Houdini for the first time, and for all the rest I'm self-taught. I study pretty much everyday. There's plenty of free tutorials, classes, courses, lives, workshops, reading material etc etc out there in the internet. And there's also good paid ones (courses, patreons, platforms), if you want to go for it. I recommend you to probably take a course, if you can afford it (Rebelway, Houdini-Course, CgCircuit). If not, try to search for classes on KZbin or Vimeo, also get involved in the community, entering Discords and stuffs like that.

[@raimuhammaduzairfareed7628]

That's amazing great work what render engine do you use to render this? Cpu or Xpu?

[@brunohmerli]

Thanks! I used Karma XPU

[@jameejamshid9921]

Nice work. great effort. what are that grains ? is it vellum or just pop ?

[@brunohmerli]

Thanks. It's a bunch of POP sims combined together :)

[@Richieee]

Hello! How did you manage to make the antennas simulations? I've been trying for so long now and I can't find the parameterts to make it work...

[@brunohmerli]

Hi! I made it with a vellum hair simulation. Using just a line to represent the antenna and using a point deform after-sim to transfer it back to the original geo. Pin the root point to the animation and adjust your stiffness and bend values. Trick is: the less resolution on your lines (the less point count) the more stiff your antennas will be. So I would say you will need a low resolution on them. In general, that's it. You can DM me on Instagram if any doubts. ;)

[@joaovictorcunhadesouza3212]

Seria legal fazer um tutorial top demais o trabalho

[@invisible-o6v]

Great❤❤ could please share how to create landscape texture

[@brunohmerli]

Thanks! I download textures from Quixel Bridge and created the shader with MaterialX and triplanar projection

[@invisible-o6v]

@@brunohmerli you have Patreon or anything for subscribe

[@invisible-o6v]

Great ❤❤❤❤ need tutorials❤❤❤

[@gergokiss1395]

Hello. Nice job! Can you recommend me course(s) that you learned Houdini from?

[@brunohmerli]

Thanks! I took only 2 beginner courses from Unhide Studios, which is in PTBR language. From then I'm all self-taught and helped by the community ;)

[@gergokiss1395]

@@brunohmerli I see. Thank you, and keep going this way!

[@ely_akhundov]

how did you added the giant terrain inside houdini? I have a very similar scene inside unreal engine and would like bake/export it to houdini for generating the same style of dust trail. Do I need to add the landscape into the sequencer and bake everything together? Or should I convert my landscape into a mesh, then reimport into the viewport and align it, then drag and drop it inside the sequencer, and bake everything at once? please share your insights

[@brunohmerli]

I don't know much about Unreal Engine. All I did for my terrain was create a massive plane, add noise and shader ─ all inside Houdini. I can't help much on HOW to do it in Unreal, but for the Houdini simulation part, the terrain use is just for collision. So you don't have to use ALL the terrian ─ just an important part of it. Also you can use only a proxy, no need for highres terrain mesh.

[@ely_akhundov]

@@brunohmerli what about the car mesh itself? My car has too massive polygons. 13m triangles. Should I decimate it and then import it in houdini? What was your car mesh like

[@brunohmerli]

@@ely_akhundov I've downloaded the car asset on the internet. I don't remember quite well, but I think it is something around 3~5mi polys. But for Houdini collisions, def too much. Better if you use a proxy version.

[@courseknowledgestation8057]

Make a tutorial on it

[@joaovictorcunhadesouza3212]

Pouco video tutorial de Br houdini

[@hyposlasher]

Wrong physics - the sand shouldn't blast out from beneath the wheels as if fired from a cannon

[@bbrother92]

Jesus Cache Size: 453GB - how many ssd you have?

[@brunohmerli]

Hahaha I was saving this on my dedicated 2TB SDD. But tbf I'm still learning how to optimize my caches. The last project I did the cache folder was almost 600GB 😅

[@bbrother92]

@@brunohmerli 2TB/600GB so only 4 projects in a lifetime =)

[@brunohmerli]

@@bbrother92 Oh - and then I move them to a bigger hard disk when I'm done working on it!

[@bbrother92]

@@brunohmerli I don't how mesh could weight so much, why it's so big, is it posible to do retopology or some optimisation

[@bbrother92]

It is look like houdini saving each grain and each atoms coordinate and velocity