| dc.description.abstract | I have developed a set of Houdini Digital Assets (HDA) to control phase change in
materials that melt. Examples of real world materials that exhibit these phenomena include
melting candles, molten steel, etc. The purpose of this tool is to provide artistic user
control when animating these materials. The user can provide an object model as an input
to the HDA, which can then be split into multiple sections as per the user’s needs. The
user can then specify attributes such as temperature, viscosity, and a melting rate for each
section. The object is then filled with particles to resemble a particle based fluid object,
with each particle inheriting the attributes of the section it belongs to. When the simulation
is run, two conditions control the behavior of the phase change at each timestep. First, the
particles melt only at the rate specified for their section. Second, the particles from one
section do not mix with those from another section. These conditions are implemented
using custom digital assets in Houdini that I developed. Once the simulation is complete,
the user is able to combine the deformed meshes of each section into a unified animated
mesh and proceed with shading, lighting, and rendering. | en |
