Storyboards

I've been working on some storyboards for the first scene. I think that if these work out we may use these instead of the (rather tedious) written camera movements. There will still need to be some written descriptions, but not nearly as many.

I have slightly simplified and re-written the first scene to make it quicker and easier to film, as well as being easier to follow. (always very important!)
 Remember, the script is not locked yet, so feel free to put in any changes you think would help (always commenting, so we know what you changed)

Here are some of my first attempts:

O.K., so it's not great, but you try drawing in a moving 15 passenger van!

Feedback wanted!

Smoke reference

I know I'm going to need this later on, so here is a really helpful article about smoke and explosions.

http://www.blendernation.com/2013/03/12/how-to-render-large-scale-smoke/

Blender 2.66

Don't forget to download the latest version of Blender everyone!

http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-266/

Lots of good features in this release.

light explosion

Explosions can behave very differently depending on the color of background and lighting. Here is almost the exact same settings for the smoke (with an improved domain) but a different color background. The smoke has apparently gone from light grey to dark grey. It hasn't really changed color, but in contrast to the background it looks different. It's the little things like this that matter in CG!

Rendered in 1080 x 1920 (not 1920 x 1080)

Resolution:     120

Smoke high resolution:     4

Dissolve:  1/40

And this time the domain is almost big enough...

Explosion test video

Here's the render!



As you can see, I made the domain too small. I'd redo it and just post the better version, but it takes a really long time to recalculate the smoke. I had about 72 GB of smoke cache files from this video!

Explosion render

It's late, so this is all I'm going to post for now, just a teaser: 

Settings were as follows:

Smoke resolution:     100

Smoke high resolution:     4

Render: 4K png 50% compression

Blender version:     2.59 (r39307)

Those smoke resolutions take up a lot of resources though. It was using almost 2 GB of memory each time it computed a frame. It goes without saying that it used all the CPU! For about 60 frames, it took almost 8 GB smoke cache.