I’m currently working on a nebula shot for my student thesis film.
These are bunch of my trials & errors I’ve been through. Please enjoy my tears ;)
My first approach was to sim this with particle fluid and mesh them to vdb, and them combine them both (particles, vdb) in comp to get that wispy& detailed look.
little render test, stacking particles on low res volume
It definitely looked nice, but the problem began when I rendered it in animation.
I had weird clipping issue with the particle geometry and didn’t really like how the foreground particle looked (very grainy) when it came near the camera.
So this is my second approach, no particles just volumes, distorted with a lot of stacked noise.
Still testing out how it will look with the moving camera, lighting and shading volumes were much harder than the particle-based method.
For now I’m also testing the axiom solver for volumes, I will post it when I get some results.
Stay tuned!!
UPDATE
straigh out from the test render… sorry about my bad lighting lol
I was so lost…. I even tried to learn 3ds Max in 2 days(HAHA) because I wanted to try out the Krakatoa renderer from thinkbox
I couldnt find a way to convert to PRT files in houdini so I just made a test setup in 3ds Max using Fume FX and Stoke, rendered with Krakatoa.
Krakatoa was indeed really powerful when rendering billions of particles, but my RAM maxed out and had multiple hard- crashes (I use 96Gb) so I just went back to houdini ;)
However, it was a fun experiment!
https://www.vfxarabia.co/post/startrek-nebula-making-of this post gave me tremendous help on starting with this workflow. Definitely check it out if you are interested!
pw: 1103
I just put a password on it because my thesis film isn’t released yet (I felt shy :D)
Thanks for reading!