"Fireflies" is a short motion graphics exploration in Houdini using Arnold renderer. A short breakdown follows. The 3D system is surprisingly simple and is made up of scattered points being advected through a curl noise velocity field. Boxes are then instanced to each point and VEX script controls the orientation, size and color through point attributes remapped from the point velocity. Then I simply placed cameras in interesting areas and added a POP system of spherical light-emitting geometry. The shader has heavy sub surface scattering to give it a wax quality and the main box color is controlled by the point color. I think this project is the first time I rendered depth of field directly in 3D instead of using a depth pass. I think it turned out really nice and I was able to avoid some compositing headaches by rendering the depth of field but was also expensive to render. Some of the frames took as long as one 1.5 hours (and I rendered this all on one computer). This is mostly direct from render and there is little compositing.