In the first shot, all assets were created by Houdini. This includes clouds, smoke, light beams, shockwave and mountains. A lot of use was made of Houdini’s VDB nodes as well as the pyro system. The smoke and clouds are similar in that they both require an emitter to create a large particle simulation, which is transformed into a solid model by the volume related nodes in order to be rendered. The difference is that for the tornado clouds, a velocity is added to the cloud that rotates from the centre and spreads out in all directions, thus ensuring that the cloud can rotate around the centre to achieve the desired effect. The light beams are achieved by using pop particles through an emitter. The mountains are done using the plane and mountain nodes to give some noise and other variations.
