In 2015 I was part of the VFX Team that enhanced some shots for the German Shortfilm Funkenflug
I had the pleasure to work on one of the fire shots which I hadn't done before.
At first I tried to conquere the task in C4d with the (at the time new) X-Particles Domain object but soon found out that it wasn't up for that kind of task yet. As I didn't have a valid TurbulenceFD nor Naviè license I decided to go with Houdini Indie in which I had done some simple tests but nothing for a real production.
With the help of quite some tutorials and the nice Houdini Manual I was able to create a simulation which the Director liked and I could create(simulate and render) in time .
In addition I created a simple proxy house in C4d that roughly matched the shape of the one in the plate and could be used as a Shadow-Catcher, Houldout-Matte in Compositing as well as Collision-Geo for the smoke and fire. In Houdini I than fractured it's roof and brought it into the final scene in which the 3d tracked camera+position locators and my actual fire simulation lived.
In the end I rendered it in Mantra and sent individual passes for the smoke, fire, illumination, shadow,... over to the compositor who added some additional details/effects.
The Shot in Syntheyes(3d tracking app) with 2 friendly waving figures to check if the track is solid. I got the solve and project file from another artist.
I created a simple Proxy Model of the house that roughly lined up with the locators in the scene(it wasn't 100% accurat ;-)). The hole in the roof was created in Houdini. Later I added some geo for the windows so that it covers the smoke and fire later in the shot.
The same Scene in Houdini. Here the Smoke and Fire is missing as I deleted the 50GB of Cache Files after the Job was completed.
The AFX Project which I handed over to the Compositor who did some additional effects and clean up to the render passes
When we started to work on the short film it was planed that I would work on more than one of the shots but because a family member passed away and I wasn't able to work on it for about a month I ended up only working on this one. But never the less it was a lot of fun and I learned a lot.