Nebula R&D

Working on a nebula shot for my student thesis film. These are a bunch of my trials & errors along the way. Please enjoy my tears ;)

Approach 1 — Particles + Volume

My first approach was to simulate with particle fluid, mesh to VDB, then combine both in comp to get a wispy, detailed look.

It looked nice, but the problem appeared in animation: weird clipping with particle geometry, and foreground particles looked very grainy close to camera.

Approach 2 — Pure Volumes

Second approach: no particles, just volumes distorted with heavily stacked noise.

Still testing with the moving camera. Lighting and shading volumes was much harder than the particle-based method. Also testing the Axiom solver for volumes.

Update

I even tried to learn 3ds Max in 2 days because I wanted to try out the Krakatoa renderer from Thinkbox. Made a test in 3ds Max using FumeFX and Stoke, rendered with Krakatoa. Krakatoa was powerful for rendering billions of particles — but my RAM maxed out and I had multiple hard crashes (96GB). Went back to Houdini.

Fun experiment though! Reference that helped tremendously: Star Trek Nebula Making-of — VFX Arabia.