Devil's Anus (Thor Ragnarok Fan Art)

I love working with smoke simulations and figured I'd do a whole project only on this topic.

This is directly inspired by the VFX for Thor Ragnarok's "Devil's Anus" wormhole. After gathering reference material I started experimenting with the setup. I thought a simple SOP animation of VDBs would have worked but it wasn't detailed enough. So I tested DOP simulations with different sourcing geometries. I had to fix some problems along the way and tweak a ton of parameters for turbulence, dissipation and more.
Then it was a matter of rendering. For this, I worked in Redshift. In comparison with CPU counterparts, this was blazing fast and really nice to work with volumes. I set up the lights, the right materials both for the tornado itself and the surrounding environment and some extra simulation.

Compositing pushed it to the next level. Adding rain in 3D from camera movement, glow, color correction and voilà!

The icing on the cake: awesome sound by Nicholas Frickleton!