When I was seeing the scene of House Atreides leaving Caladan in the movie Dune, I wanted to do something similar: A spaceship rising out of a lake. I knew I never would reach the details and scale of the movie, so I went for a smaller project. That’s when the idea of an isometric landscape with a flying saucer was born.
During my first steps I was trying with blender’s internal fluid simulator, but that one crashed quite often. So I compiled myself the flip-fluids add-on from their GitHub repo. This worked much more reliably and I was able to finish the simulation.
Another challenge was to get the appearance of an approaching ufo with an isometric camera. To achieve this I needed to animate the scale of the ufo, which needed quite some iterations to tune (and I’m still not 100% satisfied, but I need to call this done now…).
The ufo generator and the water material from the animation is available on my GitLab repository.
Credits:
HDRI - Polyhaven
Trees - Maxtree
Sounds - Freesound
Simulation - Flip Fluids
. feels good.