Senior FX Artist Milad Sãvar has shared a new Houdini R&D focused on realistic water adhesion on animated character surfaces, featuring a character animation by Creative Technologist Alessandro Cracolici.

For character-driven water FX, Sãvar notes that adhesion plays an important role in creating convincing water buildup, dripping, splashing, and interaction with the character's surface. In this R&D, he explored several procedural workflows in Houdini to reproduce these behaviors.

These workflows include collision with custom VEX and SOP Solver, particle controls for body adhesion and splash dripping, POP Fluid and Gas Tension workflows, custom VEX controls for velocity and position targets, noise sampling directly from the source, and post-process techniques to fix particle gaps.

Sãvar also shared the HIP file: it's available here.

In other setups, the artist explored custom wave curve simulations using Copernicus and large-scale ocean overflow inspired by Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes film:

Earlier, we featured several cool water setups made in Houdini, which were based on Wētā FX's research on Lagrangian waves: Pavel Morozov's recreation of realistic bubble movement based on Wētā FX's documentation on bubble dynamics, Fred Bello's RiverFX, a Lagrangian Houdini water simulation, and Moisè Asta's highly detailed simulation of Lagrangian waves on a water surface with FLIP:

Houdini is great not only for water simulations but also for other VFX that can be incredibly fascinating, like this mind-blowing Möbius-style wristwatch by 3D Artist and Technical Director Matt Taylor and graphite pencil particle FX by 3D Artist wildWillowPillow:

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