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FX: Moonlight Trail
- hankim28
- Jan 9
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 9
Organized by newest to oldest
2/9
The environment cameras were created! The tracking in camera 2A was very finicky and made the LightTrail look like it was shaking. It looked rough. Figured it out and found out this camera was out-of-date, so an updated version of my simulation will be uploaded this week!
Here are some screen-grabs of the LightTrail:
2/2
To be transparent, the past couple of weeks do not have enough to show off. Classes got in the way of my progression, but I plan to change that around now! Here's my most up-to-date flipbook of the volume. I love the viscosity and density and wish to continue that look for the future.
1/19
To make sure the FX interacts with an environment correctly, I setup a small scene to work inside as the Metamorphosis environment is created. This environment acts as a guide.
The biggest concern for this FX is environment interaction and shape. The volume needs to emit enough glow to register as a 'streak of light' and to glow the ground it moves under, but not enough glow to blow out the shape. Here's a frame from my first render test.
What to prioritize from here:
Volume density & voxel corrections
Shape of the trail looks too stiff in my opinion. Should look fluid
Karmapyromaterial (takes away the little details of my FX. trying to work around this)
1/14
Curves:
The tool is setup to follow animated geometry along a curve. This allows for full control when applying it into a real environment. Here's an example of this:
Shape Base:
Referencing the "Thin Trail Smoke" tutorial, I setup the general shape of the LightTrail and applied it to my curves. I made an exagerated version as well.
Volumes:
'Pyrosource' and 'VolumeAttributes' were applied to my base shape:
Sparkles:
The second layer of the FX are the sparkles! They vary in size, movement, and age. I love the viscosity so far. I want to add different star shapes into the sparkles in the future.
1/9
Over the winter break (November 13th - January 5th) I completed the tool for our "Moonlight Trail" FX. This is the sentient 'being' that helps guide our main character away from danger and towards the hero shot. The look of the Trail comes from a collage of different references:
(The top right is a sketch of the general idea I had in mind for the FX. I wanted to capture the look of a God Ray, but with some sort of volume and texture inside it to better portray our stylized fantasy theme. )
During my research, I came across a great reference video that helped capture the shape of my volume.
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