Stephen Hopkins

Lancelot - Overburn Effect (Fluid Shaded Dust Particles)

For my final portfolio project in 3D animation and Special Effects, I wanted to make a short animation showing off the model I had created, and also some cool particle effects. The bullets are rendered as hardware streaks on a separate pass. For the dust clouds from the bullets hitting the ground, I followed the Overburn technique, which is attaching fluid shading groups to particles, and animating the fluid as a per particle attribute. The particles were then composited together with the Knightmare frame in After Effects.

I had some problems getting the particles to batch render without caching, and after caching, the per particle random seeds stopped working. The weird thing was that the render worked on individual frames, but not the batch render. I searched around on the internet and some people said they had to make a script that did a fake "batch render". I didn't really wanna hack my way through to get an animation so after trying dozens of things to fix the bug, I believe what may have fixed it was the order that I cached the particles (the tracers, and then the fluid shaded clouds).