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We were able to render out and start compositing work on the EMP Shot. We initially thought that some of the issues we had with the EMP could be helped out in comp but that appears to not be the case. I am going to go in and overhaul this EMP effect to make it much more detailed.

I was able to knock out these trails for this shot in a couple hours. We will have to see whether or not it needs more work when I get the render back which should be soon. I know that I will probably add some ground-kickup detail. At this point trails have become pretty easy and I get more and more time every time I do one to see if I can further optimize my workflow or try out a new technique.

Added some more levels of detail to the 2nd EMP shot including some static lightning and a wave that passes through the EMP with some volumes and particles. This shot might look pretty dramatically different after I overhaul the EMP Sim.

We were able to fix the errors with the virtual memory relating to rendering on our farm. The problem mostly boiled down to us being too greedy with our great resource. We split stuff up into smaller ROPs and now were rendering out some elements such as the floor and canyon walls and instanced assets seperately so we don’t need to worry about waiting around for our renders to kill. We do have to be a bit more active about pushing jobs though. That’s just the price to pay to push the boundaries and get it looking good.

Anywhere here is the first pass of the EMP Shot. I ran into some issues with removing the banding that naturally occurs when instancing voxels on a massive sphere. I was also battling with some moire patterns. The solution ended up being to increase the smoothness and resolution of the toplogy as much as possible without hitting performance and then scattering the points to instance the pyro uniformly by keeping the input in the pyro source. From then on its just a game to push and pull the particle scale and the particle seperation to get a high quality for a lower performance cost. The wavy pattern of the EMP is generate through animating the points of the sphere on only the X-axis by some anti-aliased noise.

Since this render I have updated the flames at the bottom of the EMP, I updated the dust kickup a bit, and I tried to add more detail to the EMP blast wave but I think it might already have enough detail as a wavy wall. It looks cool.

I started working on the second EMP Shot. This one will be fun because I thought it would be fun if a cool band of light passed through the missle and help imply that it is getting de-activated by having electricity along the surface of the missle. This shot might be pretty hard to pull off because all the elements are moving really fast and the motion blur is proving to be difficult. I might just override the motion blur for specific elements in the shot.