Aura Test

I'll be doing the aura for the dragon, so I did some tests using voxel fluids in Houdini to get the look of the aura.

Using a curve to control the path of the smoke:

To use the curve to influence the path of the smoke, I swept the curve with a circle, then made it a fog volume and scattered points in it. Normals created for the points on the curve using a Point SOP. The points were shifted using a Sort SOP and fed into the second input. This set of data was then used to make the normals follow the direction of the curve. I then created an attribute "v" (velocity), using the normals as the value. This attribute was then transferred to the points scattered on the fog volume. This set up was then fed into the DOP network via a SOPGeo. A field force and gastofield was used to create a field force from the geometry information. The field force then influences the smoke.


Testing with an animated object:

For this, a gas dissipate was used to make the smoke fade out over time. Turbulence was created by using a vorticle field. However, this was not satisfactory and I went into the node and added a transform, using a sine function to translate the field back and forth over time, creating more turbulence.