I made a similar shot earlier this year (https://www.instagram.com/p/CL4nUsBJENT/) but there were a few things lacking from that shot that I’m trying to get out of this new project.
Create an animation that has better still moments: A lot of my animated projects really don’t have many ideal freeze frames. It makes it hard for posting to websites like these.
Engine heat distortion
More realistic camera: a few people criticized my previous shot for having ungrounded camera movement/positioning (which I actually mostly disagree with) but this go I might play around with that.
Made a small amount of progress this week. Added traffic on the primary ave. Fixed a few buildings. Still working on the lighting/backplate. The lake is now too bright. Need to reduce motion blur at beginning.
Have had initial success creating a new aerial backplate from taking a regular aerial photo and scaling/translating it on the Z axis.
The “anti-gravity” thrusters have been a pain in the ass to figure out.
My target has been this image of a “plasma engine” (source unclear) that seems to be all over the internet
I rendered out a sim through Embergen starting with the “torch” preset, reducing it to a single flame, and then dialing in the fuel rate and temperature.
I attached that volume to all of the thrusters and rendered out the emission pass. Compositing has been nothing but a series of shots in the dark trying different blurs, displacements, and glows to just make it generally look “not awful”
The backplate is this made from this aerial photo that I content-aware-filled into a larger pano (i highlighted the original image for this demo) and then just scaled/displaced on the Z axis through a standard image node
