Entry into 2018's X-Particles Challenge.
See for rules & constraints - x-particles-challenge.com/
C4D, X-Particles 4, Cycles4d, AE & Premiere Pro.
Sound - VC Sound Designer Pack.
Sound - VC Sound Designer Pack.
This doesn't look like much, but I'm oddly proud of it. Because of the journey and not the final destination. Wanted to drop kick this idea into the sea several times and ran into a few hurdles younger Jason would of given up at previously.
Could not of finished this without Insydium's discord or Redshift's Forums. It's a silly little 5 seconds but I sunk a fair bit of my own time into this. Flip flopping between Redshift and Cycles4D multiple times and re lighting/texturing from scratch.
Finding a reference image for a colour palette and feel and referring back to it like a guiding star. You know, like how everyone tells you too.
I totally forgot to pin it, but here is the isolated colour palette.
Unexpected Pain in Bagging Area
Getting multiple colours into an EFX Sim and getting those colours out to a rendered. This caused the majority of the flip flopping between render engines as they both handle cached volumes differently. The colour in the smoke comes from a noise texture in the xpEFX Source Tag.
I thought that was the hard bit. Both engines presented issues of their own.
Cycles4D - Has a nasty habit of ignoring some rotation values when playing back a cached sim, didn't get to the bottom of it, just worked around it. In this case rotating everything 90 degrees so the smoke would move how I wanted.
Then pulling the colour channels from the point density mode was easy enough, except it was suuuppppeeerrr washed out. A hissy fit and move to redshift another hissy fit and discord chat later and I'm dropping in Gamma and HSV nodes like a pro. (bit out of practice with Cycles)
Redshift - Is my default engine these days, so started there. Couldn't get smoke working with colour, went back to cycles.
Couldn't get bright smoke going, went back to RS and with the help of a 2017 forum post got it happening.
Couldn't get bright smoke going, went back to RS and with the help of a 2017 forum post got it happening.
Why am I telling you this? because unless I missed something, Redshift handles multi coloured smoke in the WEIRDEST way.
Bringing a cached OVBD Volume in from XP4 via the RS Volume and adding the colour channel you're presented with three channels, RGB. so its all there and waiting to be used. Ended up creating 3 volume objects and three volume materials to load the three channels and dividing my desired density/scattering values by 3.
Please tell me I'm doing this wrong in the comments. Because its batshit.
Ultimately went back to Cycles because I wanted trails to inherit the particle colour. Rendered a champ with denoising and sample rate of 14, the 4k frames too 3-5 min each on 3x 1080ti's
For the nerds here's my final object manager.
I'll include the project file once the competitions over :)
