SideFX has released a detailed case study about Cinesite’s work on Academy Award nominated The Lost Bus. Houdini was at the heart of the work:

“We knew that our smoke plume needed to be very flexible to have the most impact from multiple camera locations,” said Head of FX, Carl Fairweather. “Our procedural modular system gave us the building blocks we needed to sculpt the plume shape and explicitly layer detail where we needed it.”

Artists built the initial plume design in Houdini around a curve skeleton base, on to which they instanced an array of volume modules. “The modules were procedurally built from generated base poly shapes processed through the VDB toolset,” Fairweather reported. “We applied custom displacement to break up edges, and we heavily utilized the Cloud Billowy Noise SOP, newly released in Houdini 20, to give pyroclastic details. These procedural elements held up great even in long-lens closeup shots.”

Find out more by reading the case study on the SideFX website.