Hi there,

I just wanted to share with you my very first asset, which I'm making to be used in a school project. It uses very basic techniques, ones which I'm familiar with, so I can imagine lot's of parts which could be more efficient. I have to play with the noise setups some more and customize the shader parameter interfaces, but I'm curious to hear what you think and get any tips on how to improve it.

Thanks for your time!

Wow! It looks like it's pretty extensive!

It might help to give a HIP file with an example of how to use it in a scene, since it doesn't look like it has a visible effect in a render with default settings on its own or with a box in the scene. (I'm not very good at guessing how to use most things in Houdini, so it could just be that I'm missing something obvious.)

whoops!

Thanks for the reply! Maybe this is why no one had replied yet
Apparently the Minimum value in the Volume noise has to be more than 0. I'll have to fix that because it doesn't really make sense, but for now that's the fix and it should work without anything else in the scene.

very nice!

Stripe Noise > Stripes > Frequency > is referencing itself…

a help page with pictures would be helpful

Hi there,

I haven't been able to work on this because of school stuff coming in between. Sadly, it has been written out of the project, so there's little priority left to it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzSiU1rzJv8&feature=youtu.be [youtube.com]

This is a very quick and rough render of what it could look like. I used the curves as geometry lights and graded it in Nuke using the RGB channels as masks (but you can also choose colors in the asset itself).

I've updated the asset and fixed the bugs that I found, but there's still a lot that could be better.
I'm not sure how to communicate the functionality best, so I'll just try a quick overview over here.

- In the Controls tab are the controls for the general shape of the aurora(s), animation and placement. You can view just the curves to speed things up, the shape (that gets converted to a volume) for a better idea of the animation or you can preview the volumes themselves, which are mostly quite representative of what the render will look like, but slow.

- In the Render Options tab within the Controls you can choose what you render (there's two elements in the render, the general blurry shape and a stripy version of it to add detail), the amount of blur of the volumes and the colors

- The Stripe Noise and Volume Noise control the two different render elements (so you should view the changes of this either with the Volume preview type or in the render). It's all animated as well, so you can do a playblast of the volume preview to get an idea of the motion, but I recommend testing this on just one curve since it gets quite slow.
The mult and minimum controls here don't work quite as I'd hoped, but give option to adjust the contrast in brightness of the render.

- In the Shape Noise tab are the controls for the shape of the main curves. You can skip this if you'd like to use your own curves, which can be connected in the input of the node.

I hope this clears things up a bit.

I just got the idea to change the Controls tab and Shape Noise type into Animation and Shape and change the structure a little bit.
What I mostly don't like about it right now is that in real life aurora's start really bright at the bottom and soften and darken towards their top. I have to blur the shape a lot to loose the sharp edges, but I prefer to just reduce the density depending on height or something, but I'm not sure how to adjust this. I also need to adjust the shader slightly to help with this effect.
There's quite some imperfections, but I'm getting there

Hope you have some more feedback for me!

Hey man!
Just took a short look at it, nothing in depth, but its really cool!
Also nice you added a variety of Caching options! Great Stuff!