In this workshop, Maria shows how to create a complex sci-fi magical blast effect. She covers gathering references, setting up your scene, and planning the effect, while explaining how to bring a fantastical idea to life. Artists following along can either use a ready-made scene or follow her step-by-step instructions to build everything from scratch.

Duration: 13m 57s

In this lesson, Maria focuses on planning the layout and timing of the explosion effect before moving on to detailed particle work and final rendering. She breaks the effect into four clear phases, uses simple proxy geometry, and carefully times each element’s animation. This organized approach makes it easy to adjust timing and scale, ensuring all parts work together before tackling complex simulations and materials.

Duration: 23m 34s

In this lesson, Maria focuses on advanced procedural VFX techniques for creating a layered, multi-element charging effect for her explosion in Houdini. By combining various circular shapes with carefully timed animations, color variations, and strategic positioning, she builds a complex holographic energy buildup that emanates from a robot in the scene. The methodical approach of creating distinct shape types with unique behaviors and then layering them creates visual interest, while maintaining control over individual elements.

Duration: 30m 50s

n this lesson, Maria creates the second part of her explosion effect; a magical charge that combines particles, curves, smoke, and heat effects into one unified animation. She shows how to build reusable components, control noise with multipliers and color gradients, and carefully time each element for a polished result. Key techniques, like using curve velocity to guide particles, protecting curve endpoints, and advecting particles through cached volumes, are fundamental skills artists can apply to many VFX projects.

Duration: 33m 54s

In this lesson, Maria works on the last part of her energy blast; the final explosion. She combines multiple systems like procedural animation, particle simulation, volume rendering, and custom lighting to achieve a cohesive magical effect. Her approach of separating elements into lights and volumes, along with proper material assignment in Solaris, provides both visual quality and render efficiency.

Duration: 38m 30s

In this lesson, Maria brings the scene together by adding interactive effects between the walls and her sci-fi blast. She demonstrates Houdini techniques like subsolver caching, attribute manipulation, and procedural geometry to create visually interesting effects. The result is a flexible system that produces animated glitch effects with customizable size, color and behavior, ready for adjustment and rendering.

Duration: 13m

In this lesson, Maria focuses on the shockwave and remaining smoke that make the explosion feel fully part of the scene. She combines point-based attribute transfer with pyro simulation to create a striking blue-steam effect, like heated metal vapor lingering in the corridor. The lesson also shows how to use Houdini’s procedural tools efficiently, from scattering points to running pyro simulations.

Duration: 7m 48s

This lesson provides a comprehensive workflow for creating a visually striking character disintegration effect suitable for the explosion Maria has made. The technique cleverly uses color attributes as masks to control the disintegration progression and combines geometric manipulation with custom materials to achieve a glowing effect.

Duration: 11m 18s

In this lesson, Maria shows a professional render layer workflow for complex VFX shots, emphasizing scene organization and lighting. She uses phantom and matte objects to keep effect layers flexible while preserving realistic lighting. This method ensures clean separation of elements for compositing and gives full control over the final render.

Duration: 14m 23s

In this final lesson, Maria brings the fully rendered scene into Nuke for compositing. She works with multiple effect layers, color correction, and glow nodes, while keeping performance optimization in mind to create a polished, professional result. Using free tools like Natron and downloadable filters, this workflow is accessible to anyone learning VFX compositing.

Duration: 16m 8s