I have a fully animated dragon sequence that needs a Houdini-driven fire-breathing pass suitable for a feature-film composite. The brief is straightforward: one continuous exhalation of flames that feels physically plausible, with rich temperature variation, secondary heat ripples, and natural smoke roll-off. I am aiming for the kind of highly realistic Pyro look you would expect in a modern VFX pipeline—think Scales vs. Knight-type quality, not a stylised or game-ready shortcut. The creature animation will be delivered to you as an Alembic cache together with camera tracks and a low-res body proxy. You can work in Houdini 19 or 20; PyroSparse or the classic Gas model is fine as long as you keep voxel efficiency in mind. Lighting should stay neutral—our final grade is still evolving—but please include a quick mantra or Karma flipbook so we can review flame behaviour. Deliverables • Clean .hip file with all nodes neatly labelled • VDB sequence (50 — 60 fps, 0.01–0.02 voxel size) ready for hand-off to look-dev • Play-blast or EXR preview for editorial sync Acceptance criteria 1. Fire tongue aligns to the dragon’s jaw animation with no visible clipping. 2. Flame core, secondary licks, and dissipating smoke hold up on a 4K close-up. 3. Cache loads in under 12 GB of RAM per frame on our side. Let me know your typical turnaround for first sims and any hardware specs that might affect iteration speed. I’m ready to start the hand-off as soon as we agree.