Progress Diary: Shot 9 (Final)

The final shot in the sequence delivers the conclusion of the events and actions leading up to it from all previous shot. As mentioned before, if this was real life the big explosion scene would be considered the 'money shot' with a lot of budget invested in creating big spectacle for trailer worthy shots. An interesting parallel to the world of modeling maybe considering the budget or 'money' as your rendering time and general efficiency in the scene. High quality, small file size is the goal. 

My shot is positioned at floor level, sometimes known as to as the 'tatami shot' coined by Yasujirō Ozu in reference to the Japanese mat of which the camera is meant to be from the perspective of someone kneeling on one. This makes the audience literally feel on the same level as the now defeated ATAT. This also helped in setting up the camera to be easily engulfed by the whole flame effect.

Having experimented with spherical explosions before, I felt something flatter would better suit an explosion that will engulf the rectangular shaped screen. The downside of using a box shape is that you can see the borders of it too clearly and it creates a weird effect all together. The most efficient result as shown below was the cylindrical shape. This effectively grows out from the centre and only really shows the sides from this perfectly side on angle. 
 

 Using a mesh bomb I was able to explode some of the geometry into broken parts too. I decided I wanted the main explosion to come from the centre of the body and hence this is the part I chose to blow up. To prevent the result of the parts just breaking off and falling straight down I tweaked the fall off parameters. I intentionally chose a low number of poylgons to give the impression large panels were being blown apart.

The final result is shown below in this gif:

Good parts:

• Realistic and visually engaging effects that stand out against the rest of the scene and are built up to
• Efficiently uses the position of the falling ATAT from the previous scene by importing rather than manually setting this up again

Improvements:

• Components of body break apart more realistically e.g. whole side panels attatched as one item
• Flame could engulf whole screen so nothing is shown