Beauty Approximations

Moving on. Pretty excited about this one as the liquid will reapear. 

350 shot complete . Added background image from a photo of mine, a Chicago thunderstorm at sunset I took from a high building. Think I got enough materials from that evening to patch together what I might need. Also spiced up the smoke element as I felt the shot needed something more. Latest cut.

Next shot slaped together. Need to find a better solution for my backgrounds, maybe I will pick up my camera and go hunting skies.

Decent base finished. Now back to work on the actual movie.

New version. Pretty happy with this as a base. Will go back to redo the animation to break it up a bit but then go back to working on actual shots.

  Render of crystal roo t. Two components, a liquid and the surface. The liquid has a simulated front, driven by a target mesh that's preanimated. The rear part of the fluid is a procedural solution to get a predictable result and cutting the simulation time. The inside mesh is headed by a cloud of expandig boxes, some of which can be seen on the final surface. The surface is faded in by using volumetric noise filters. Will add a glittering element inside the liquid and maybe make the solid crystal partly translucent. To make the formation more organic I will probably add some imperfection like faling pieces or some that barely hangs on.

Done with the latest shot ( updated edit ). Started working on a crystal formation setup. Again. This start to look like it will be the most time consuming part of the project. This time I'm opting for a more dynamic solution where particles will fill up a volume and push a liquid at the open borders. The trick will then be to render these so they look like one of the same, getting a smooth transition between fluid and solid.  Liquid test here, shaping a cube.   Lower picture is a test for modeling objects within a liquid simulation, something I'm thinking about as a way to really let the liquid form solid objects. This would reduce a common issue with these effects- that the motion of the transition medium doesn't match the resulting shape. Thus making the effect look like a fancy wipe and not a organic growth. As a note, started to experiment with macro footage. Hopefully that will produce some elements or references.