Pyro & Combustion
Sparse Pyro solver, combustion, smoke, explosions — hero and atmosphere.
EXPERIENCE
8 YEARS
BENDING
PHYSICS.
Voislav Nikolovski is a VFX & Simulations TD based in Skopje, North Macedonia. Eight years of Houdini-native work across pyro, fluid, destruction, and procedural FX for film, commercial, and episodic.
SECTION 01 / MANIFESTO
I started simulating fire because it was the one thing in CGI that refused to sit still. Eight years later, I'm still chasing that — fire, water, debris, sparks. Each frame is load-bearing: the eye sees one bad cached frame and the whole illusion collapses. So I treat every cache like structural engineering, not art direction.
My work lives in Houdini. Sparse Pyro for combustion, FLIP for water, RBD for destruction, Vellum for cloth and soft body, Karma XPU for renders, Nuke for the final pass. I write HDAs that compress a three-day iteration into three hours. The pipeline is the discipline.
Based in Skopje, working worldwide — film, commercial, episodic. The brief, the deadline, and the budget are not obstacles. They are the load-bearing constraints the sim has to satisfy.
Every frame is load-bearing.
SECTION 02 / SKILLS
02
SIX DISCIPLINES,
EIGHT YEARS.
FLIP Fluid & Ocean
FLIP splashes, ocean spectra, whitewater, sub-surface bubbles.
EXPERIENCE
7 YEARS
RBD & Fracture
Rigid-body dynamics, voronoi/boolean fracture, debris and dust layering.
EXPERIENCE
6 YEARS
Vellum & Particles
Cloth, soft-body, sand, sparks — particle systems designed for lookdev.
EXPERIENCE
5 YEARS
Procedural Tooling
HDAs, Python pipeline tools, shot-agnostic workflows that collapse iteration loops.
EXPERIENCE
4 YEARS
Lookdev & Lighting
Karma XPU lookdev, AOV handoffs, Nuke comp integration, final pixel polish.
EXPERIENCE
5 YEARS
SECTION 03 / TOOLS
03
THE STACK,
FOUR TOOLS.
Houdini
SIMS
20.5 · 19.5
Karma XPU
RENDER
XPU · USD
Nuke
COMP
15 · 14
DaVinci Resolve
GRADE
19 · 18
SECTION 04 / TIMELINE
04
EDUCATION
& YEARS.
-
2025
Independent — Voislav Nikolovski Studio
Lead VFX & Simulations TD for film, commercial, and episodic clients worldwide.
CURRENT · SKOPJE -
2022
Senior FX TD — Atlas VFX
Pyro, fluid, destruction pipeline lead on episodic and feature work. Built the studio's RBD fracture HDA library.
2 YEARS · BERLIN -
2020
FX Artist — Halcyon Pictures
Commercial FX work, FLIP fluids for beverage spots, sparse Pyro for hero car explosions.
2 YEARS · LONDON -
2018
Junior FX Artist — Northgate Studios
First Houdini production role. Background sims, dust passes, procedural debris.
2 YEARS · SKOPJE -
2017
BSc Computer Science — UKIM Skopje
Thesis on GPU-accelerated fluid simulation. Started Houdini production work in final year.
EDUCATION · SKOPJE
SEE THE
WORK.
Twelve case studies spanning 2018–2025. Film, commercial, episodic — every frame load-bearing.