kleer001

It looks to me like all the art is in the noise. I'd start with marrying an Perlin noise with a high frequency modulous or tweaked tan function. It's whatever the "space-swirl" procedural function is doing. The math is probably somewhere to be found. Once you get that the rest should be easy to reproduce this effect. If it were me I'd prefer to do a more literal execution, investigate how cotton candy is made then work out a quick and easy model to make that. Then move on to shading and lighting experiments.

Use a SOP Solver and advancing through the frames as you iterator. Put all your operations inside it, merge your previous frame with your current stuff, use groups (with $F of course) to sort things. If you want the 100th or 1000th iteration just use a Time Shift SOP after the SOP Solver.

Looks cool, how does it work?

I really like the building destruction, no real notes. The tornado, not too much. It seemed very uneven and slow.

Any suggestions or recommendations? Where do studios get their temporary gear for emergency jobs? Or do those venders only deal with 50+ seat setups? (and no I don't wanna build or buy my own rig just yet, I do know how awesome it is)

Tight! It reminds me of that intermediate discipline stuff. Like, it's kinda rigging, but it's also kinda modeling, but also kinda animation... Was this to solve a specific problem in production?

AFAIK they do not use Houdini. They do most of their prototypes in Processing. Then web stuff in Java. And stuff in C++ if they need real speed. Lots of the techniques they have explored are available as trouble shooting sessions and works in progress and finished works here on odForce. Just look up the technical name of what they're doing that you want to replicate.

To be honest, depending on the screen space scale, I would mostly hand animate it. I'd find some artistic way to apply noise to the staged hero page. Weather that's a high frequency or low frequency moving noise at the edges and less in the middle, or the other way around. Or just sim the outside edge 50% as cloth pinned to the main animated body.

A little essay and exploration of simulating watercolors with polygons programmatically. http://www.tylerlhobbs.com/writings/watercolor

From the lovely 2 minute papers, we have http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/liquidhair/

And here it is in real life executed by actual academics with math and whatnot.

0) starting with an animated car with tires and ground geo 1) get velocities from tires 2) generate particles along intersecting trail of the car tires from the last frame to the current frame 3) apply tire vels to the particles 4) use those particles to generate volumes over their lifespan 5) apply noise to the volumes based on density (less dense more noise) 6) season to taste

And I'm all set! I start at the new/old place in 5 days!! Thanks for the comments

I know it's a long shot, but I think I have to change it up. Can anyone recommend an immigration lawyer in Vancouver? Someone you've hired or knows the vfx situation or just film industry?

Looks good, lots of fun shows in there! Please consider adding breakdown text saying what you did.