Rainy Day

Created in Houdini, rendered with Solaris and Karma. I wanted to tackle photorealism with a simpler simulation I'd be able to polish, and so I chose to do raindrops beading on a window. Raindrops were created with POP simulations, with additional splashes generated using FLIP fluids. This project marked my first foray into Solaris, Karma, and USD workflow, something I'm very excited to learn more about in the future! Window sill was modeled in Maya and textured in Substance Painter.


Instead of using a larger and heavier FLIP simulation, I drove the majority of the motion with simple POP simulations. By converting the droplets to VDBs and then back to polygons, I was able to "dynamesh" the droplets live, meaning that droplets near each other would combine just like real water droplets do.

For the impacts where raindrops would crash against the glass, I modeled splash geometry using FLIP fluids, then instanced them on the points where the raindrops began.