VFX
Here's a Lava Sword that has been a bit of a passion project for me. I modelled the sword, textured it, and made the VFX! I made the VFX using Flip Fluids in Houdini combined with Unreal Engine Vertex Animation Texture, as I wanted to challenge myself and get more comfortable with Houdini. My intention was not to make this for a game system as much as it was to learn more about fluids and VAT. The most challenging part, however, was getting the drips going with the lava, and after running many simulations and experimenting, I finally ended up attaching multiple systems with different parameters to get the intended effect.
I used this concept art by Josefine Rosenlind as my reference:
I started out by playing around with Houdini's flip fluids by using a proxy geometry as the collision. I used a second system for the drips because they required a lot more surface tension and a different particle density than the main fluid. I then rendered it out as a VAT with the lookup, pos, and rot files. I created the lava material, smoke and sparks in Niagara.
