Mike Sawicki

There's probably a bunch of really cool ways to simulate that. It would be funny to see an over complicated fluid sim video that could achieve it, but kinda like Mike_A suggests some standard modeling might also get you there fine. My materials and rendering in houdini are pretty bad right now and im still learning myself but I wanted to see what this would look like, its just a bezier curve with a sweep. If you were more precise with everything it would probably look pretty close to your reference. I'm not sure the best way to get the colors on the helixs like the reference, like how the inner and outer faces are different and some have clear glass running down the centers/etc

Ok thanks, I think ill try to keep an eye on system usage while im working, I noticed this happens randomly, not just with pyro. Redshift gave me a "ran out of gpu memory" error earlier and i just had to close and reopen the scene which was weird, this gpu has 24gb ram

I just came across this tut, it made me think of your wings a bit - it uses vellum like gordig suggested; might be worth a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd8f3Ek5tLI [www.youtube.com]