My first ever large project in Houdini was to recreate the volcano eruption shot from LOTR The Rings of Power S1E06. This was my longest project thus far, spanning across a total of four months, from pre-production, gathering reference, assets creation, texturing. simulations, lighting and finally compositing. I intend to revisit this project one day and make it even better.
The biggest challenge for me in this shot is the Volcano and Simulations. Getting the right look and scaling of the volcano is a crucial step in getting the whole scene to look epic. The simulation was also another challenging part due to it being done on actual real world scaling. All in all, even though I suffered a lot in this project, it was still worth it in terms of the skill and knowledge gained. I've even slowly developed an interest in Terrain modelling and generation lol!