Freschrenders - Judgement Day (Part 3) - Work in Progress #8

Well here is is, folks! The longest shot I've EVER produced, coming in at 1,150 total frames. The GIF is a BIT large in file size and LOW in resolution so you can find the shot attached in a video format for this post.

This shot gave me a chance to revisit a technique I used back in Building Bliss, the animation featuring Sara the Shark.

You might have seen a similar effect in movies where glass fracturing and breaking reverberates up a building. This is due how shockwaves travel through structures. The shockwave from Legacy's paw will travel from the bottom of the building to the top, causing the glass to explode outwards up the building. Below is the initial setup for splitting each glass section so velocities can be properly applied.

There's a few ways to accomplish this effect. I ended up using a bounding cube that's animated to rise up the building rapidly, activating an attribute called "active". This attribute tells the RBD solver if a packed piece should be used in the simulation or not.

This can be set in the RBD solver by setting "active" and "animated" to 1 and checking the "Use Bounds" box for the active attribute. Now everything inside of an attached bounding box will simulate in the RBD sim and everything outside will not.

Now exporting these sims was a challenge in itself. Typically I use Alembic geometry caches, but at large sizes those are unreliable and often crash Blender. I ended up switching to USDs (Universal Scene Description) as while Blender doesn't read all the data correctly, they are still a LOT easier to use inside of Blender than Alembics.

This is a shot that I'm sure a lot of you have seen in other macro animations over the years. I've always wanted to try the classic "below the city street" x-ray view and do my own little details.

I accomplished the vignette of the road through the shader editor and some transparency manipulation through object location. This can ALSO be done through the compositor but I preferred to do it in camera as I concluded it would be easier to see the results in camera. The boxed in area is what to pay attention to.

I'm essentially just taking a scaled empty and creating a vignette effect around the location of the empty. This allows me to play with the scale of said empty object in viewport to adjust the scaling of the vignette around the camera.

I found that extra detailing beneath the road would be important too. There are all sorts of pipe systems that run beneath the roads and sidewalks of cities so I figured it would be a neat detail to include.

One of the most fun FX elements to work on for this shot was the rolling shockwave of dust at the end. I started off by using a particle system emitted by a "pyro burst source" node. This created the "wavy" looking shockwave effect that you see below.

Throwing these particles into a smoke simulation eventually led to what you see below.

The simulation has some extra elements as well that make it look a bit more chaotic. The use of a "gas disturb" node breaks up the uniformity and introduces some noise into the simulation.