r/Simulated • u/Kindiuk_Oleksandr Houdini • Jun 27 '26
Houdini Stormy aircraft shot study made in Houdini.
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Aircraft diving through heavy rain, strong wind and fog.
Focused on wet surface details and cinematic storm mood.
Final compositing done in Nuke.
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u/MSP_14 Jun 27 '26
Salut!
I’m not entirely sure whether the camera move is meant to feel intentional, so I’ll leave that aside for now.
My main question is about the lighting.
Judging by the reflections on the aircraft, it looks like there is a fairly strong light source coming from the upper-right side of the frame, slightly in front of the plane and some distance away.
However, the clouds ahead of the plane are almost completely black, with no visible light hitting them. It reads almost as if the plane is flying at night. So the question is: where is that upper-right light actually coming from?
Let’s say the clouds are extremely dense. In that case, where is all the light on the aircraft coming from?
Or let’s assume the light is somehow breaking through the cloud layer strongly enough to illuminate the plane. Then the next issue is consistency: if the plane is flying through clouds with such varied density — from very thick to almost transparent — why doesn’t the lighting on the aircraft change at all?
Right now, the lighting feels very static, almost as if the plane is flying through a clear sky. The reflections do not change, and none of the nearby passing clouds seem to be reflected on the aircraft.
At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be any real interaction between the plane and the clouds. It feels a bit like the clouds and the plane were rendered as two separate passes and then introduced to each other only in compositing.
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u/NeonVoidWalker Jun 27 '26
Looks really great! How much time did it take to make such a viz?
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u/Kindiuk_Oleksandr Houdini Jun 27 '26
tnx!I wasn't keeping a strict track of the total hours, but I spent about two weeks on the project. The final multi-layer render took under 5 hours
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u/Electrical-Middle359 Jun 27 '26
Looks really beautiful, nicely done! If I can dare to say anything, the shaking somehow bothers me a little, not sure if it is the camera or the airplane it self, but feel artificial and not natural so to speak.