JayAims Posted August 8, 2016 Share Posted August 8, 2016 (edited) Hello Houdini Masters! I'm having trouble with finding a starting point for creating a beam of energy being shot out of the barrel of a weapon. I haven't worked with particles much, but I don't really understand how all those particles become something so clean as a solid beam of "energy". I have some reference as to what i would want the beam to look like: (lilo & stich - the green ray from Jumba's gun): (WoW: Legion trailer - Sylvanas's arrows she's shooting) If anyone has any links to tutorials, articles explaining the process for this, or has any first hand experience working with partcles/"energy"beams your help would be most appreciated. Thanks in advance Edited August 8, 2016 by JayAims Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Farmfield Posted August 8, 2016 Share Posted August 8, 2016 Hehe, the question is, are those particle effects? All/only particles? There's nothing that says it has to be particles. And particles are just points with particle attributes used with a solver that uses those attributes and input forces to advect them - if mess around with points in a solver SOP, you basically built your own particle system. My point here is you shouldn't lock yourself into thinking in terms of particles, think about the beam you want to create and then use whatever tools needed to create it, be it particles, SOP geometry, fluids, etc... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atom Posted August 8, 2016 Share Posted August 8, 2016 Sometime those effects are just done in post. For instance, the light saber style particle beam can be done with the Video Copilot Saber plug-in. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Farmfield Posted August 8, 2016 Share Posted August 8, 2016 ^ also a very good point. (though AE makes me cry, even if VCP's plugin's are pretty awesome) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JayAims Posted August 8, 2016 Author Share Posted August 8, 2016 51 minutes ago, Farmfield said: ^ also a very good point. (though AE makes me cry, even if VCP's plugin's are pretty awesome) I think that one may have been a bad example. something more like this green beam from the spear Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rbowden Posted August 8, 2016 Share Posted August 8, 2016 For something like the green beam from the warcraft trailer, I would start by doing a particle and geo based solution. Particles for the trails and maybe geo for the front hot core. It looks like some volumetric solutions were used for the trails in a couple of shots after also. All this is really going to be about shading. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atom Posted August 8, 2016 Share Posted August 8, 2016 (edited) Here is a particle beam effect example HIP file I found on this website a while back. I'll repost it here. ap_particle_beam_effect_01.hip Edited August 8, 2016 by Atom 3 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
grendizer Posted January 16, 2021 Share Posted January 16, 2021 Did you manage to make this scene work in Hou 18.5? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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