The short film “La Main des Maitres”, created with Houdini, shows some fantastic steampunk fantasy work that really shows off the features of Houdini.

Smoke explosions were created using particle simulations with metaballs copied to all the particle points to add volume. The set geometry was then tagged as colliding geometry and characters were knocked out using shadow mattes. The effect was then rendered with a billowy smoke volume shader using Houdini’s Mantra renderer.

See the movie after the break.

via La Main des Maitres – Side Effects Software Inc..