3D Asset Details for Aurora borealis

This Asset creates a Aurora Borealis Effect, also known as Northern Lights.

The Effect is highly artdirectable and meant to give full controll especially if the Aurora is a Hero Effect.

It is build for fast interaction offering Realtime abstractions of the effect for fast interaction. Almost all aspects are controllable but some controls are optional, keeping the user focused on a small handlable aspect at a time.

It uses a volume-based approach, that has many advantages over the commonly used "extruded curve" approach. Auroras can be spread over a larger area, broken up or seperated into parallel bands.

The newest feature in this version is a Discrete Fourier transform, that allows any input curve to be seperated into frequencys that can then be shifted individually.

more information can be found at the Assets Webpage:

http://cgriese.com/aurora-borealis

A full video tutorial on how to use the asset is also on the page. I highly recommend watching it.

Studio Licensing comes with a open asset that can be costumised and support through the authors email adress found at the web page.

A trial Version is available for Apprentice.

Updates & Support

You can contact me at 24h7d.creative@gmail.com. I´m also open for zoom calls on any more complicated support matters. My Timezone is CET

If you are testing the Asset and anything does not seem to work properly on your system, please write me a mail with your Houdini Version and type, I usually fix issues within a day or two and offer support, if necessary by zoom or similar conference software. Also feature requests are appreciated, but will take a bit longer.

If you had earlier versions installed, make sure to remove them before installing this version. Orbolt doesnt support changing the version number, so Houdini might still load earlier versions if you don´t remove them from your scanned otl Folders. In case of any bugs this is the first thing you should try.

A few hints about rendering

This asset generates a volume with baked in lighting. There is no light scattering inside the volume, or anything that relies on heavy raytracing that would demand a GPU Renderer. Volume creating takes up most of the rendertime, with renderer itsself usually using a couple of seconds. So it´s easiest to render this with Mantra. Default shaders for other renderers are in developement, until then, you have the option to bypass default shading and plug in your own materials.