Blizzard Brawl

This week I've been focusing on the foreground elements. Doing RBD's for the pillars and having them and the character interact with the snow on the ground. I used vellum grains for the snow and it's a real pain to get stable and behaving the way that I want. It's not perfect, but it will have to do with the limited time remaining. There are grains that pop and fly away but those can be removed easily with a blast node. I still want to add debris and smoke to the pillar destruction. 

Hello, my name is Joe. I have a real passion for creating FX. Especially simulating effects like RBD, fluid, etc. Unfortunately, I just discovered this amazing challenge a little over a week ago, so I feel really far behind looking at some of these other awesome entries. But I'll do my best to try and catch up! Having such a short amount of time left has really made me prioritize my time and focus on the big picture. I decided to go with a snow environment for this challenge. I really liked Steven Knipping's brief, and I've never simulated snow before, so I figured if I'm gonna compete in a challenge, I might as well challenge myself and try something new!

This is my first render. This has several simulations. The base is a fairly low res RBD sim of the ground. Then on top of that is a grain simulation for the snow. I also spawn several particle sims off the RBD chunks for additional floating snow and pieces of debris. 

Here's my second update. I've upped the res of the snow and changed the behavior so it's more sticky and clings to the monster. I've also added a pyro sim that spawns off the snow grains based on there position and speed. I also spent a lot of time try to optimize my render times. Changing the way the snow particles are rendered reduced my render times from 10 mins to about 2 mins per frame. I have been using the gpu to render but upon adding the smoke I begin running out of vram very fast so I may look into splitting the render into different passes and doing all the geometry on the gpu and pyro on the cpu. This render doesn't include the RBD and debris sims, but those will be added for the final render.