My goals for this project were Learn Niagara and Pyro in Houdini. I used Andreas Glad's Tutorial which was a great introduction but I wanted to understand Pyro even better and completed the "Houdini Volumes" course from Stephen Knipping. I hit many obstacles and documented there solutions in 9 Unreal and 15 Houdini Tutorials. As the effect is not "just" a common explosion, I had to use many workarounds. It is real-time but everything is based on a specific radius of the shield and that the barrel is at xyz:0.0 in the scene.
⭐The Unreal Project: https://simonschreibt.gumroad.com/l/apeqp
⭐The Houdini File for the Fileball Flipbook: https://cloud.simont.de/index.php/s/eyrfTe9fPotnMZR
⭐The Substance imact crater file: https://cloud.simont.de/index.php/s/NaPApsfWaeGPQRa
⭐My WIP Thread: https://realtimevfx.com/t/simon-trumpler-sketch-22-barrel-explosion/8799
⭐My Unreal Tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/c/UnrealSimon/videos
⭐My Houdini Tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/c/HoudiniSimon/videos
⭐Andreas Glad Tutorial: https://app.pluralsight.com/course-player?clipId=a2601f40-a0bf-4222-8212-d1aecf4f55ab
⭐Stephen Knipping Tutorials: https://www.cgcircuit.com/bundle-details.php?val=28
A happy barrel filled with oil gets very excited.
Different perspective to present the colliding smoke better.
I've created a loopable fireball. You'll find a tutorial at the bottom of this page.
I'm using 2 textures. One contains the lightmaps (up, down, left, right) in its RGBA channels. The other has the fire in RGB and the alpha in A. But to be fair: I'm using only the R-Channel for a BlackBody-Node. G/B could be used differently.
Get more info about this shading trick: https://simonschreibt.de/gat/company-of-heroes-shaded-smoke/
To align particles set in the Sprite Renderer:"Alignment:Unaligned", "Facing Mode: Custom Facing Mode", "Bindings>Sprite Face Binding:Particles.Position".
To make sure the positions are ON the shield, I set the position by: normalized(pos)*shieldRadius
The screen space smoke is a cheap trick. It would be better to stabilize it like Jan shows: https://twitter.com/JKashaar/status/1047979071609757702
To get collisions on the shield, I placed a sphere in the scene and moved its vertices to its origin with vertex shader. This makes it invisible BUT the collision mesh is still where it was.
My tutorial about creating a loobable fireball flipbook in Houdini.