Create Your First Project

Start adding your projects to your portfolio. Click on "Manage Projects" to get started

Condesation Simulation

This project was all about creating a realistic condensation simulation. I knew from the start that I had to do it in Houdini because of the level of control it gives. I also modeled the bottle myself to have a proper base for the simulation.

The setup is currently being developed into an easy-to-use HDA, which is almost finished. So this isn’t just a one-off setup for this project it’s a tool I’ve been building for myself to use in future projects as part of a bigger pipeline.

Here you can see all three parts I exported: the green ones are the static drops, the tiny ones are the trails left behind by the moving drops, and then we have the actual falling/moving drops. I used USD for the export and chose to export the static drops as points, since they make up the majority of the simulation. If I had converted them to VDBs, the polycount would’ve been around 35 million, which would’ve been way too heavy for Blender to render or even handle properly.

While in Blender, I had to scatter my drops onto the static points. I did this using Geometry Nodes, along with several attributes I created in Houdini, such as random rotation by ID and point scale for controlling the size of each drop. These attributes allowed me to keep the same variation and distribution as in Houdini, making the final result look nearly identical to the original simulation.

The scene itself is very simple just a plane with a texture and an HDRI for lighting keeping the focus entirely on the droplets.

.pro-gallery-wix-wrapper {display: block !important;} .pro-gallery-wix-wrapper .gallery-item-container {opacity: 1 !important; display: block !important;}