How to achieve Battle LA Invasion Smoke

[thinkinmonkey]

Hi all,

I'm impressed by invasion scene of movie "Battle LA", when aliens are falling on Earth:

Image

I'd like to know how to achieve those kind of smoke trails and ring explosions.

Sprite particles are good, but I think they made all volumetric.

So I'm bit confused about what path to follow in Houdini: volume? fluid? pyro? Where to start?

The tool to setup the simulation is quite ready, it's still in progress, but now I'm working on particles simulation and on their final aspect:

Thanks in advance.

[pclaes]

1) There is a particle smoke trail with ring particles on this:

http://www.3dbuzz.com/xcart/product.php?productid=58&cat=0&page=1&featured

2) -> though ignore the volume side of it, it's terribly inefficient. Much better to do all the smoke look at rendertime:

3) On a further note you could get an idea of the math to get those vectors here:

4) Someone else did something similar recently:

5) Or you could do it all in a sim with custom fields (you will still need to define your own vector field based on the math in 3) ):

http://www.peterclaes.be/tutorials/PeterClaesThesis/index.html

[thinkinmonkey]

Peter,

thanks a lot for the links.

2 and 5 are very very interesting, I'll give them a deep lecture... hoping to not melt my mind...

[thinkinmonkey]

I don't know exactly what I'll get, but now I know in which direction to see!

Thanks again.