Nacho Pyro Simulation

Nacho is a bearded dragon rig that I modeled and textured from scratch. Here is a goofy project I made with the little guy as to show him off and show that he may have a personality a bit more on the spicy side. Everything for this project was done by me from the animation to the lighting. Animation was done inside of Maya exported as an alembic. Simulations are done in Houdini as a pop particle simulation to create the rasterized volumes to feed into the pyro simulation.

Here is the start of the set up. I use a sphere with an animated mountain node to scatter points across it. Then with some noise I add a upwards velocity and some curl noise to the velocity. After that I set the burn and temperature values to be rasterized. On the right side I bring in the Nacho geo to be used selecting to points on it. One to copy all my just created points on the left side to to source them in, as well give them a normal direction that points out of Nachos mouth.

Pop simulation to simply take in the points feeding in from above and push them out. Give nice velocity and go ahead and create the shape for the pyro sim especially when rasterized and sourced into it.

Collision set up first using a Boolean with a sphere to make sure the points have space to actually spawn in within nachos mouth so no weird clipping issues happen. Then that geo is fed and converted into a collision vdb for the sim.

Simulation is here as well as a pyro bake so I can see the outcome. I also on the left brough the camera in and used its frustrum to make an area that if particles leave they are deleted to optimize the simulation.