Spaceship Simulation - 001

I've been wanting to create a short for a game/film using 3D software's for a while similar to something like the Astartes short made by 'Syama Pedersen'. In addition to creating something to just look cool, I wanted to increase my skills in Houdini and other 3D software's in hopes of honing my craft and maybe getting a foot into the film/game industry. Similar to the Razor Crest being pulled out of water in the Mandalorian or something from Pacific Rim, I want to create a big ship rising from the ocean.

I have had ideas of the opening shot looking into the bridge of the ship from in the water whilst 2 fighter ships (meant to be searching for the submerged ship) fly past over the water. The ship will then rise and tilt and then shoot off into space (Hyper/Quantum jump.) I think having the water fly off the ship as it disappears into space within a few frames with just some water and foam left to drop back into the ocean would be a really cool shot.

I also want to try working on some other FX in Houdini so I also want to create some laser beams being shot down at the ship from the fighters that have circled around. Having some of the beams hitting an invisible shield the ship has and some of them creating big impacts into the ocean around the main ship. I also want to try simulating some thruster effects and maybe come up with something cool for when the ship jumps.

I got some random ship from CG Trader by 'Dermalt'. I originally wanted to create something for the game 'Star Citizen' but after trying for multiple days to try and extract assets using an old software called StarFab which doesn't seem to work anymore because of new versions of the game. I also tried to use ship models the game devs have released in a fan kit, but the files they were saved as '.ctm' seemed to be extremely compressed and looked as if they were low res VDB's so for now I am just sticking to the model I got from CG Trader and will just work on getting a nice water sim for now and worry about swapping it out for a better ship later on, even though I know the proportions and everything else will completely mess up the simulation at least I will be able to streamline the process a bit easier then.

I first started by shrinking the ship down a bit as it seemed way to big for the size I imported it as. I then started hand animating the ship to slowly rise up and tilt back a bit before it shoots off. After watching it a couple times I realised there would be a bit of drag from the weight of the water on the areas of the ship that had more surface area, I then had to animate the ship re-distributing the weight to balance the ship back out and came up with something like this.