Personal Project: Street Energy
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I used Houdini to deform the wall and ground meshes, where I had previously applied a Voronoi fracture. I then used Point Deform to drive the transformation and rotation of the fractured chunks, achieving an organic, impact-driven destruction effect.
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After that, I imported the point cloud of the fractured pieces into Niagara using the Houdini Niagara ROP. I exported the necessary attributes, such as each chunk’s position and ID. This allowed me to reconstruct the wall inside Niagara while also having access to per-particle IDs to drive the simulation in real time.
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I built a custom Niagara setup using a few Scratch Pad modules and two emitters: one containing the point cloud of the wall pieces, and another acting as an influence area. This setup lets me control which particles fall within a certain radius and should be affected by forces in the particle system.
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This way, I can fully drive the simulation inside Niagara and precisely art-direct the destruction, affecting only specific areas while leaving the rest of the pieces intact (similar to a glue constraint system).
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For the textures, I created flipbooks and textures in Procreate Dreams and exported them as TGA files.
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For the “tech-stylized smoke,” I experimented with the Substrate material system to combine multiple material layers within a single shader and achieve the desired look. I also used a Custom HLSL node to generate a grid mask, giving the smoke a more “techy” appearance as it dissolves.