Shot 3 Reflecitve Blog

The third shot of the animation is more of a late establishing shot that'd typically go at the beginning of scenes. I took the week to first match the perspective in the storyboard vignette using BLAM before creating the buildings using array modifiers for the windows, and random proportional editing for the imperfections. Then I made an emitter that dispensed icospheres (blocky spheres made from triangles) of a variety of shades and sizes, to emulate smoke.

The first thing I liked about my progress on shot 3 is how the smoke ended up looking and matching the low poly, vorticist aesthetic. I also liked that because I didn't make the materials on the icospheres light emissions like everything else in the scene, it created an orange-red glow from lights I put in the building, which impressively looks like fire!

The main learning curve from this shot was using particles which I rarely ever do. Especially using external objects to replace particles from the emitter, I certainly want to use particles a few more times during this project.

What I'd do differently next time is find a better means of compiling the assets in the scene, without flipping it upside down. By the backend of the week and with little time before having to render, instead of finding out how to make the smoke lift up, I simply flipped the entire scene, including the camera, so the smoke falls out of the building but appears to fly upwards.