Welcome to a new Houdini Course: Laser Reveal

Houdini

We are going to start by creating a growth attribute that will be the main driver of our FX.
From this attribute we will be able to generate a growing VDB mesh, and the laser Rays as well.
We are going to set up different custom attributes to help later with shading.
We are also going to generate smoke where the laser creates the geometry, and also create a simple fog volume to add a bit of ambience to the scene.
Aside from the Helmet geometry which will be provided, we are going to create everything from scratch directly inside Houdini.

Rendering

For rendering we are going to use Redshift. After we set-up all the materials, we're going to cover the best ways to setup various render passes for compositing.

Nuke Compositing

Finally, we will bring everything together in Nuke, where we start by recreating the beauty pass.
By separating all of our AOVs we will have complete control over all aspects of the render, such as reflection, specular and GI.
We're going to combine custom passes and attributes to create new layers and bring more detail to the scene.

Downloads

You will have all the geometry required included with the downloads.
The download archive also include the completed Houdini project file (ver. 19.0.622)