Hi Guys,
So been wanting to do another World War Two, Battleship FX Shot since I did the Battleship Explosion which I Plan to re do soon (this shot was a great opportunity to learn from my mistakes). I really do want to do a "Jaw Dropping" Battleship Explosion shot and do it properly, By that I mean full 3D Fluid interaction, because it looks really cheap just using PFlow to fake splashes which again I resorted to it in this shot, but I will be Testing do the water interaction for the next shot. Also need to do proper destruction of the metal tearing and the explosions bursting out. Also a Really amazing thing is my Granddad who is currently 91 served as a Royal Navy Gunner on HMS Lively which was sunk by a JU "Junker" 88 German bomber in May 1942, He Survived but many died. And that really makes me want to make a realistic Battleship Explosion shot! Anyway thats another story.
So this shot idea came after seeing WarThunder Heroes by RealtimeUK, I will be honest and say that I feel aspects of this shot could be better I had a hard time with the water shading, Also I feel the Explosions are to fast.
Method:
I started on this shot one night just did a basic Model of a Dock Wall which surrounds the ship, The ship is meant to be on its way to sea but gets bombed at the harbour. All of the layout and camera layout was done and locked, I then split the scene into a FumeFX Scene to work on and also a Scene to start working on the rendering side of things. Also Scenes were saved to work on the Water Splashes and also the Smoke Streamers see below!
The Next Day I worked on the Fume FX Explosions, For this shot I was actually looking at the film Pearl Harbour and the one shot which is 1 Hour 27 Minutes and 15 Seconds into the film where the Japanese Dive Bomber attacks a ship, you see it drop a bomb which causes two explosions, these bombs explode on the deck of the ship. So thats what I was going for. So I used 3 Fume Grids, One for the first explosions, One for the Second Two Explosions and one for the smaller smoke trails. The Long smoke trails you see were made using Facing Particles which had sprites of smoke texture map on and it saved a lot of time because theres no need to use a huge fume grid to simulate thin smoke trails when you can do it this way. When you look at images from World War 2 of Ships Exploding you can see big thin white trials of smoke, I believe this is when the Ammunition explodes.
The Explosions were all particle sources and also there was some smaller smoke trails which were simulated. I think I made the mistake of the explosions been to quick, its hard to get the balance right because I did not want them to look like they were in slow motion but at the same time I want to see a quick burn rate of the fire.
While I was working on the explosion sims I also started working on the Water Explosions/Splashes surrounding the ship which Add to the scene and populate it. I have done tests with Realflow in the past, but for this scene I started using Fume FX but later used a PFlow System, Using Spawn and a lot of inherited speed along with a water shockwave. I rendered 3 Splash Elements, also a Water Shockwave which you see go off under the ship. Also the Final Explosion Elements were rendered. For Next Time I will be using a Fume Setup/ Realflow Setup to create a water blast libary of scenes and caches I can add into my scenes.
Once All these were rendered it was time to focus on the geometry renders. The Lighting was based on a HDRI but also some V-Ray Lights to show on the waters Reflection, Water is very hard to get looking realistic when looking top down, this is due to its refraction so By using a lot of Lights I could define the surface deformation. On That note the Ocean was created with a High res Plane and using Houdini Ocean Toolkit. The Ships wake was actually also fake, using Texture maps of Foam and a Real Ships wake. The Shading and Rendering of the ship was nailed down in my last shot so I just used the same setup. As I said I had a hard time with the ocean shader, probably rendered a good 30 different iterations and it still I think needs to look better.
All the passes were rendered with V-Ray including a Fume FX GI pass to cast illumination onto the ship. A lot of the work that makes the shot look as good as it does was done in comp, I actually 3D Tracked use AE's Camera Tracker the Battleship Pass so I had a 3D Camera in After Effects doing the same cam move as the camera in Max, I know theres ways to export the camera from 3DS Max to AE But its a really weird workflow! So all the Water Splashes were layered in as 3D Layers and positioned over the water. All the rest of the passes were comp'd with a lot of key-framed blur to get it looking more realistic, the Camera shake was added in comp aswell using the Wiggle Expression. Also all the Fume Elements were comp'd and look so much better for the colour correction on them! Then I Graded the shot aswell.
Breakdown Of All Passes
FINAL SHOT
Overall I like the shot, But really want to start testing for doing a proper nailed down Battleship Explosion Shot, I learnt alot in making this shot. I really need to work on shots for longer instead of trying to do as much as possible, I kinda worry I don't have enough work for my reel! However I don't think I could of got this quality of shot say 2 months ago, so I feel definite progression!
Gonna be Working on this Battleship Explosion shot to get better and better along with some other shots I want to have a go at!
No comments:
Post a Comment