It’s an understatement to say that Houdini volumes have a lot of depth, there are just so many possibilities and fun things to explore. After making a few requisite pyroclastic clouds I decided to see what can be done without DOPs. In other words, what kinds of effects can you get without simulation or just converting input geometry? Here’s the first part of an answer – you can use VOPs to create animated volumes and cloudscapes that are surprisingly fast. In these I first filled a volume with a sin wave and then introduced alligator and perlin noises at different frequencies following the sinusoidal surface.


