Continuing on from the previous weeks, I proceed further with testing out the first power, now against a dark background and slower, more controlled movement of the hand. I also added a slight glow on the hand, using roto as a mask for colour correction. Additionally, I played around with the colour of the power, the god rays and the overall grade of the shot.
Furthermore, I tested out the first power being placed between two hands, and whilst with one hand a simple 2D tracker was suitable, this time I did have to use a 3D tracker and to try and find the best position for cards in the 3D space. The final result still appears to be attached more to the base of hand situated furthest away, so maybe by manual adjustments of the card it would be possible to make a more realist effect. I am also considering to adjust the camera in Houdini, such that the render of the power will also have the effect of changing perspective.
Then I started working on the wind based power, but I am not happy with the overall shape of how the particles are flowing around. Since it is now more abound wind, I am considering whether to leave the attribute of temperature out and just have it appear as smoke, rather than having a hot emitter in the centre. In that case, the God Rays node isn’t suitable anymore.
This is the original shape that I wanted to go for, having this sort of vortex/tornado pathway of wind, but it appeared too intense and unnatural. So playing around and creating a different source for the smoke (see below), I decided to use the information for velocity from the vortex and feed it into the source as a force for the smoke to be affected by.
This is how the Dynamic Operator network looked with the simple force of the velocity and smoke emitter being merge and solved using a pyrosolver. Having played around with it, I considered creating a second smoke object, where instead of being directed up and by the vertex, it would fall down and wrap around the hand. But that may be way harder to do, as it would required hand modelling and animation inside Houdini. Instead, I will try and achieve a different look, as vortices going up, i.e. just as I wanted originally.