… almost, but not quite finished project (shots still rendering, some not yet done):

Click here: [thalion-graphics.de]

It took me a while to get close to what I'd call “done” here. Started out seriously with Houdini last summer in the course of a general effort to up my skills. As a project I chose a scene featuring two characters I had already finished before, a boat ride across a stormy ocean, but put it at temporary halt in favour of this one here. Could not get render times managed in 16.5 due to escalating amounts of foam and my non-understanding of how to set up a volume material with spec for it, wanted to retry using 17, but had no nerve at the time to redo all the whitewater sims from scratch), so it had to wait, I needed a bit of sun and beach first.

Goal was to get a complete movie style scene done from beginning to end, including all stages of the pipeline, testing a workflow enabling me to get around some of Blender's restrictions and push the limits a bit further.
All the modelling, character rigging and character animation was done in Blender 2.79, the characters are the same I used in the first scene … and yes, I'm aware that I'm not the best character animator, there's definitely room for a lot of improvement.

Ocean, cloth and softbody hair, wine in the bottle, sand were done in Houdini, as was the cloud sky and the environment map baked from it, the materials & rendering itself, and last but not least all the postpro.

It was (and still is) a wild ride through SOPs, DOPs, VOPs, COPs, and ROPs, yay.
I was proud when I got the first ocean waves roll, the first foamy wave crests splash. I was really proud after I got those beach waves expanded into a large ocean. ^^
And I was utterly surprised of how utterly kind Vellum SOPs are towards the user, so simple and painless to use. ^^
It is fast as hell, and delivers accurate results. Wow.

It was and still is a great experience to put all those things together, and feel all restrictions and fetters released. Only the sky (or, well, my own lack of skills) is the limit. ^^

AND, yes, the lack of processing power. I need more CPUs, more RAM and larger HDs.

Great work on the water! The only thing material wise/color wise I would keep in mind for future projects, is to keep the colors of your clouds at a lower saturation. They will blend in better with the color of your sky better. But great work for jumping into Houdini so soon.