Things exploding (preview)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ko_NMu7Sr6hyaPezBSAfRKlCwXhbSBkf/view?usp=sharing

Cos you know the embedded video will not work, here's the link.

This one is a sort of intermediate step between a pre-vis and the final thing, and I think it's kind of interesting. At the moment, the explosions are missing bloom and to cast light on the ship, these are the next steps, cos they look sort of pasted on top right now. What you'll notice as well, is that there's no Roane or ship in the foreground. This is where it gets kind of cool.

So, I've already got my camera angles and external lighting for the scene, and I know where the exploding ship is in relation. So all the lighting and angles correspond to the ship in another Blend file. Once I've got all the elements of the exploding ship completed, it will be rendered as a set of images with a transparent background.

This will then be imported as several image sequences into the main file, so all this explosion stuff happens on what is basically a screen outside the window. 

The way to think of it is like a video lasagne. The bottom layer is the animation of the ship flying then breaking up. On top of that go the explosion layer (with emission and bloom added). Then above that goes debris and other effects.

What this means, is I can get a complex sequence into the animation without having to do compositing in the end, and without racking up the render time. There's another example of this already. In the pre-vis files I shared a few weeks ago, when the camera falls through the ring of smoke around the light beam, the smoke is a flat image animation using this technique.

I think I'm finally getting some progress with this scene, now I've figured out how to improve the explosions and get them working better, once I get rid of those annoying flame puffs after each explosion.

But still. Progress!

*EDIT (15/6/21)*

This scene is getting close to completion. Spent the day doing some pretty tricky animation for Roane, which is now done. I've also added some more effects for the ship explosion. Then I built a new planet, because at the scale of the models in use, even a scaled up sphere with lots of segments still had flat edges. For reference, Roane is at human scale. The planet is 9km, just to have it fill enough of the screen, because they're still in a fairly close orbit, so there needs to be lots of planet.

The planet has been made from scratch, and is now another image texture laid into the image. At this point, nearly everything outside of Roanes ship is just images on planes.

To complete this scene, I've got 3 more tasks:

• Roanes speech
• Texture the exploding ship & re-render the sequence in higher quality
• Improve the explosions and render at high quality
• Create debris pass for ship destruction
• Learn to count

I'm hoping I can knock out a few of these tomorrow, but not sure how far I will get as I finally chased up the vaccination thing and am due to get stabbed tomorrow, which means a bit more freedom, but also I fucking hate needles. If anyone is putting holes in my body, it's going to be me with my hobbies.