01
SOLVER · PYRO
Pyro & Fire
High-density combustion, mushroom clouds, rolling flame walls and directable fire that hits a frame target. Smoke, fire, ash, embers.
Voislav Nikolovski / VFX & Simulations / Skopje ↔ Worldwide
Biennale / Edition 2025 / Index N°03
Voislav
Nikolovski
An eight-year retrospective of Houdini simulations — pyrotechnics, viscous pours, slow destruction — curated as if the work were already inside a museum.
Discipline
FX / Sim / Lookdev
Engine
Houdini 20 · Karma XPU
Status
Open for Q3 2025
Index
N°03 / 24 works
Wall label — Room I
A studio practice that treats every simulation as a finished object — catalogueable, signed, re-exhibitable.
Voislav Nikolovski is a Houdini-based FX artist working out of Skopje for feature film, episodic and commercial clients across Europe and North America. His work moves between two registers: the loud, physically rigorous simulation that the brief demands, and a quieter personal practice that treats each solver as a material to be shaped.
This biennale collects eight years of that work into one exhibition. The pieces are not arranged chronologically. They are arranged the way a curator hangs a room — by temperament, by surface, by the conversation two simulations have when placed next to one another on a wall.
Nothing here is a still. Every artifact on display is a simulation that ran, cached, and rendered.
Room
I
Wall
East
Catalogue
VN-2025-01
Works in the collection
06 / Index
02
SOLVER · FLIP
Fluid & Water
FLIP & SOP-level solvers for splashes, droplets, viscous pours and ocean surfaces. Meshing that survives a 4K grade.
03
SOLVER · RBD
Destruction
RBD / FEM / Vellum pipelines, multi-impact simulations, secondary debris and dust — art-directable from first take.
04
SOLVER · VELLUM
Particles & Vellum
Granular flows, cloth, soft-body, hair & fur. Tight integration with crowd and creature FX teams.
05
PIPELINE · HDA
Procedural FX Tools
Custom HDA libraries — asset-bound solver presets, scattering systems, terrain eroders. Built for a 30-person FX team.
06
KARMA · SOLARIS
Lookdev & Lighting
Karma XPU / Solaris lookdev, AOVs wired for comp, hand-off packages with test renders baked into the USD layer.
Selected work — index
03 / 24
Houdini FX
Pyro
Fluids
Destruction
Vellum
Karma XPU
Solaris
Lookdev
Pipeline
Houdini FX
Pyro
Fluids
Destruction
Vellum
Karma XPU
Solaris
Lookdev
Pipeline
Methodology
04 / Process
Step 01 / Brief & Reference
Establish the frame, not the look
Begin from camera. What does the shot need to do narratively, on what lens, over how many frames. Reference is collected against the cut, never against a moodboard.
Step 02 / Blockout & R&D
Solve the silhouette first
Low-resolution sims cached fast, played back at speed, before any high-density pass. The motion is agreed at half-resolution; the rest is rendering.
Step 03 / Simulation & Cache
Let the solver be the material
Run the full-density cache. Tolerances locked against the silhouette. Frame ranges cached for re-time, retiming is never baked into the sim itself.
Step 04 / Render & Hand-off
Hand off as a layer, not a movie
Karma XPU render with AOVs wired for comp, USD layer baked with test frames and notes. The hand-off is a layer the comp team can grade, not a finished frame.
Collections & institutions
06 / Lenders
Wall label — Room VI
Have a shot that shouldn’t be possible?
Open for one feature slot, two commercial slots, and the occasional rogue R&D brief — Q3 2025 onward. Reply with the cut.