This will be a quick little update. Everyone knows each 3D package has their strengths and weaknesses. Like Maya is super flexible but horrible with simulations, and Houdini is amazing with simulations but you can pretty much forget about UV's and keyframe character animation of anything more than 2...

This is a different take on the smoke ship project. I dropped renderman, and particle systems to simplify the pipeline.

I brought the softbody simulation back in which was already cached on the disk before and hooked it up to an isooffset node under S...

This is a meteor effect I've experimented with using Houdini, Mantra, and RenderMan as well.

Three particle systems spawned over 25k particles in midst of their lifetime. All particle systems were rendered with Mantra seperately and then composited on top of each other in the compositing section...