Snow Attack:

This is a real time effect running in Unreal. I created everything within the effect besides the character and character animations. My inspiration for the piece hinged on staying within the theme of snow, so everything that happens through anticipation to aftermath fits within a snow aesthetic. The snow elements were all created in Houdini. The first thing I did was tackle the large clumpy snowflake that appears under the enemy. I created the snowflake by recreating the koch snowflake within houdini, using the math principles in a procedural format, and then adding form and shape with some noise setups within VEX and vdb conversions. And for the snow simulation, I used the mpm solver in three different spots. The first was the snowman drop, the second was the snowman destruction and third was the after math trail left by the character. The last thing I did in houdini was creating a vector field that followed the shape of the koch snowflake. Moving to Unreal, I messed around with different variations of snow materials, and ended up choosing a more emissive magical looking material. I opted for geo caching the simulations instead of vat animation, mainly because of the scale of the effect and performance values. I created a lot of different niagara effects, which played the houdini assest, but also added snow flakes and smoke flipbooks. Everything was combined in blueprints and the shot was taken with the sequencer.