Creative shortcuts 🐢 As a junior in the VFX industry one the things I regard highly is the cleverness seniors often show in their work. The concept of "end goal always triumphs correctness" and the way you can take shortcuts to achieve your goal if you're being a little creative about it. I'm currently learning all I can about RBD simulations (the purpose of this video render is not the RBD, which obviously isn't great), but rather the smoke. I've just started tinkering with smoke simulations in Blender, but quickly got fed up with the amount of time it takes to cache OpenVDB files.
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So I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could using comp improve or "up-scale" the smoke simulation resolution using the original smoke render and Blackmagic Design Fusion Studio. The smoke domain in this video was set to only 50 which resulted in a fast render, but blocky looking smoke. My goal was to improve the overall look of the smoke, whilst maintaining the original layer mask and only subtracting from the original smoke layer. I accomplished this goal by first rendering a more denser smoke from Blender, which I then in Fusion used in combination with various animated noises combined together with displacement.
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Personally I think the improved smoke looks a lot better than the original, and even though a high resolution domain size would probably yield the best overall result I love trying out creative ways to "improve what I have". After learning this technique I can further optimize my time doing VFX, since there never is enough time.
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Original smoke render from Blender on white background. Domain resolution is only 50 which makes the smoke look very "blocky".
Processed smoke render from Fusion.
Original smoke render from Blender. Domain resolution is only 50 which makes the smoke look very "blocky".
Final comped render with the processed smoke from Fusion Studio.
Side by side. Processed smoke on the left. Original to the right.