Create a cinematic, production-ready ocean FX shot in Houdini by simulating a massive tidal wave colliding with a cargo ship.
This advanced course walks through every major phase of the workflow, from building optimized FLIP simulations and meshing, to secondary effects like whitewater and mist, and rendering with Karma CPU. You’ll also gain access to high-quality example files—including a detailed ship model—to follow along step-by-step.
A key focus of the course is to use simple Houdini native tools and tricks to achieve the best visual cinematic output. Rather than relying on overly complex setups, the course emphasizes clarity, efficiency, and smart design choices to get professional results.
Whether you’re aiming to level up your water FX skills or integrate Houdini into your film or game pipeline, this course equips you with practical, industry-relevant techniques for large-scale ocean VFX shots.
Note. This course focuses only on the Houdini FX workflow. The compositing for the final shot is not included. The finished comp was created by Fabian Nowack using Nuke.
Key Course Takeaways
Technical & Practical Skills
- Build Procedural Ocean waves and creating simple keyframmed animation
- Build and optimize large-scale FLIP guided ocean layer simulations.
- Emit and control realistic Flip secondary simulations,whitewater and spray using both custom approaches and whitewater solver.
- Airfield concepts.
- Integrate Pyro-based mist and ship chimney effects.
- Render ocean FX using Solaris and Karma CPU.
Creative Outcomes
- Design a dramatic ocean sequence from scratch.
- Art-direct water behavior using vorticity, droplet values, and custom emitters.
- Develop a realistic sense of scale and weight in water interactions.
- Layer effects for final presentation with pro-level visual polish.
Who Is This Course For?
This course is designed for artists with:
- A foundational understanding of Houdini SOPs and FLIP simulations
- Basic experience with Solaris and Karma rendering
- A desire to build polished, cinematic FX shots for portfolio or production use
- Ideal for junior to mid-level FX artists transitioning into water simulation workflows.
Hardware and Software Requirements
Software used
Houdini 20.0.547 (Apprentice, Indie or FX version) Minimum recommended version: Houdini 19.5
Hardware used
INTEL CORE I7-13700K 14 CORE LGA1700
RAM: 128 GB
GPU: Nvidia RTX 4060 16 GB
Storage: SSD SAMSUNG 990 PRO 2TB M.2
