For day 6, I tried overlaying fire on the buildings in shot 3. I tried using emitters with particles. I then added a fluid shader to particles. Finally I added the "thick cloud puff" preset, to simulate smoke. However this took a long time to render, thus I scrapped off the idea. I then tried using stock footage for the fire. I merged different fire, smoke, debris and dust stock footage to the live plate. It turned out well. Also I tried simulating the missile fire and smoke trail with Jian Hunt. We used different omni and directional emitters for the trail.
Day 7
Today, I continued working on the missile trail. I looked at references from the internet and found out that for missiles, the trail of smoke behind is usually quite short and will disappear into the air in a short period of time. I also took the models of spaceships from Jian Hunt and started animating them for shot 2. I used EP curves and attached the spaceships to them. I also adjusted the speed which the spaceship was moving along the curve. I then added glow to the afterburners of the spaceship.
When you composite fire remember to color correct them so the brightness and saturation are matching. In your "fire.jpg" shot, the two redder fires on the left looks more real but not as strong as the more yellow explosion on the right. Try to make the colors and brightness more matching.
ReplyDeleteAlso, remember that fire doesn't have a dark outline so usually that means using an additive blend mode (add, plus or screen). Overlay blend is nice but it saturates the element more and it can also darken some parts. It's up to the compositor to choose what works best.