I’ve been trying to achieve a convincing atmospheric re-entry effect for some time. I tried several methods (simulation, particles, volumetric shading…) But the most successful method currently is using the geometry node and the mesh to volume node.
The idea is to extract the part of the mesh that faces the airflow (x axis) using the raycast node and extrude it around the object and then back. The volume conversion creates something quite interesting and with a bit of noise in the shader and compositing here is what I managed to do.
There are still a lot of flaws with this technique: The first being that it’s obviously not physically realistic, and the edges of the volumes are always a bit blocky.
And then what annoys me the most is that I can’t control the density of the volume as I want to make it sharp and blurry where I want (increasing the voxel amount reduces the blocky edges of the volume but makes it very sharp…)
While waiting for me to improve the technique, let’s hope that suzanne has put on her heat shield before going home!
The nodes are very messy, it was mainly a test to see the potential rendering…
I am in the process of redoing everything properly to make an animation of the atmospheric reentry of the Starship rocket.
This may not be the right place to ask this but if you have any ideas to improve the effect I’m curious!
I imagine Ton Roosendaal in a white pith helmet excavating the Suzanne-orite crash site in the dutch lowlands… He founds a strangely perfect gray cube. In its surface, a source code is carved…
He enters it in a computer to see what it is… And the legend is born…
I got carried away, sorry, looks really good indeed!
