I made a scene to try out some new stuff in Blender.
I made a quick tentacle to try out the bone sketching tool. Awesome tool.
Then I made some texture for the tentacle with nodes.
Originally I had a reflective surface on the tentacle but I had to replace that with a material mapped to reflection to cut the render times. Not as good but it works.
Then I downloaded the “Blender Python Scripts Catalog” that was up on Blender Nation a while ago and I really liked the Camera Jitter script, it brought a really nice hand held camera effect to it all.
Added some sound and ambiance to get a good atmosphere.
Hey that’s pretty cool looking! I would’ve liked to see something get destroyed though, but it’s just a test so that’s fine.
Well for an exploding dust cloud, you’ll want to use the particle system. What I used to do to get a good volumetric look is use spheres as your particles and have the texture mapped by the world, not by the orco, that way there’s some nice texture variation. You can also set it to an empty that slowly moves upwards so the dust slowly billows.
oh wow! i had been wanting to do something just like this in blender for a while! i’d say you’ve succeeded in capturing the ‘feel’ really well. i’ll have to look into this bone sketching tool.