Houdini Viscous Fluids

This project’s inspiration came from the Netflix original series Daredevil. I wanted to try to emulate the effect in the intro for the show here with a 3D model of a BB8 robot unit from the new Star Wars VII The Force Awakens.

I first placed the 3D model of a BB8 robot added a single spot light above it. I then added a sphere as the fluid particle emitter just above the BB8’s head and added a mountain node to add a bit of change to the stream of fluid. For the flow of paint across the BB8’s body, I had to adjust the Thickness of the Surface of the static object in the Autodop to .01 for the fluid to take the shape of the robot. I also turned off “Use Volume Based Collision Detection” in these parameters as well. I learned through research of viscous FLIP Fluids that changing the float precision to 32 bit and using OpenCL in the FLIP Solver is more efficient, so I made those changes as well. Then, I rendered my simulation. Composited in After Effects then edited with music in Premiere.