[Animation Scene] Adding Special Effects - Part 1

With all of  the animation keyframes, all that is left for my animation before rendering it out is to do a pass adding special effects. To begin, I started adding smoke and explosion effects to the ships that have been damaged in the scene. Selecting the model I want to add the smoke effect to, I select the "Smoke" effect from the effects menu. In this menu you can set some attributes to change how the smoke appears. I wanted the smoke to be thick, but also I wanted it to kind of puff out of the ships, to show that it is damaged. To achieve this effect I set keyframes for the smoke that limited the max amount of smoke particles (this was set to 5000). This allowed me some control over when I wanted the smoke to stop emitting for when the ship explodes.

Below is a video of the smoke effects added to the ships that are going to be hit by laser shots in the scene. I will be adding the laser shots later on in part 2 of this blog post.

Next I needed to create explosions, starting with the explosion in scene 2. At first I tried a method that used a fluid emitter, however I found that is was extremely taxing on my system and also didn't produce an effect that warranted all of the extra render time. In the end I settled for a much simpler effect by reusing the smoke effect again, but all situated in one spot. I also deleted the gravity and drag elements for this smoke so it stayed suspended in the area I wanted the explosion to happen. Because the Tie Interceptor already had a smoke element attached to it to show damage, I decided to make a cube object that would act as the emitter for this explosion (I later set this to be invisible).

To finish the effect for the explosion, I applied a lambert texture to the smoke particles and made them an orange/red colour to better represent an explosion. Below is a video of the explosion effect in motion.

With the technique for making the smoke effect and explosions, I started to add these effects to the other scenes, starting with scene 4 as shown below.

Next I added the explosion effect to scene 5, where the A-Wing crashes into the large asteroid.

Finally, I added an explosion to scene 6, where the Aethersprite is chasing the Tie Interceptor and flies through the explosion for the finale.