Battleship Explosion Shot- Unfinished

Been working on this shot for the past week or so, but due to now working on a WW1 themed project at college I decied to comp all the renders of this shot so far so I can focus all my efforts onto that project.


This was actually a second version of a shot I was working on this one been the improved version.

Version 1 of the shot, Which was Scrapped!

Method:

I started out with layout, nothing crazy, just the Battleship asset and a HOT (Houdini Ocean Toolkit) Ocean surface.

Then started working on setting up a basic PFlow system to throw debris out from the explosion, this was then baked using PFlow Baker ( a free script for Scriptspot.com).

Then I started working on the Fume FX and this was my first iteration of the Fume FX sims:

Everything's lowres however I wanted fire at the end of the smoke trails as well as more trails, so I used the Spawn operator to spawn trails that lasted only 2 frames, these trails would emit fire for 2 frames which creates fire on the end of smoke trails, quite a good method for doing smoke trails with fire on because you can specify how long there fire trails are due to the age of the spawned particles from the initial particle birth event.

You Can see what that looks like here:

The Fireball itself is pretty simple, based from 3 PFlow soruces emiting a few frames from the last, the Smoke turbulence was controlled by an effector but I think I went overboard with the fire turb which caused the smoke to look really noisy towards the end of the shot as the fire is generating smoke thus inheriting its velocity to the smoke.

The Final Fume Sim took around 3-4 Hours to sim And was rendered out in around 7 Hours.

Next Was Rendering the Geometry, All objects and cameras were locked down so in each scene file the objects would be the exact same which is vital when rendering any Animation/VFX shot. My Fume FX Simulation was rendered with Max's Default Scanline Renderer, My GI Pass was rendered with V-Ray as well as the ocean and ship and the snow particles were rendered with Krakatoa. So 3 Diffrent Render Engines for this shot.

A big task was the ocean, My usual ocean shading techniques were not working for this shot:

Iteration 1

Then I tried another shader setup  I have been experimenting with to get fake surface foam using a cellular noise map:

Iteration 2

Too Tropical and Foam scale is too small

Better but to translucent and desaturated.

Added a Sea Bed (Plane) to give the translucency a better look. Looks Good!

The Ship Rendering was pretty basic, The Turrets were more metallic where as the ships body was less reflective to give a kind of rusty feel. You can see a big Sphere which is actually casting a fake shadow on the ship for the Fume FX Sim!

And After All of this was done, The time had come to Render and Render and Render!!! And then some Comp in After Effects.


Final Shot:

Thanks For Looking!