This wyvern just got even more dangerous. You can find the animation over on my YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN3OlXJHPgU

My biggest challenge yet, I wanted to see if I can create a fire breath VFX shot. The simulation domain had 550 million voxels and the VDB files alone took 65GB. This very high resolution is necessary for close-up details and preventing the flames from being blocky due to larger voxel sizes. I pushed every part of my system to the limit, which is good because now I know where the limits are. Rendering volumes like smoke is still one of cycles weak points and rendering this took a long while.
I even had to re-render parts of it because the wind animation broke. Only for it to break again on the re-render because for some reason the noise seed kept resetting at random moments. No idea why but after X hours of wasted rendering time I decided to just live with it. Sorry for the sudden jerks in the movement of those plants.

Without counting the rework this took 50 hours to render, so my resources were bound in the past weeks. Setting up the simulation and overall scene took comparably less time, I only spend a couple hours on that. Looking forward to move on, even tho it was another great learning experience and I now feel somewhat confident in my ability to create different fire and smoke effects. I would love to combine this with some RBD destruction physics.


Nargacuga model by  asuros