Slone McGowan

Genuinely super grateful for all the input so far. @CerberaEnded up doing exactly that and going hand-drawn for this one. Long term It'll be a huge time saver to be able to do this procedurally. I'll keep trying to figure this out with C4D - the toon shader / arnolds equivalent have been super useful so I'm hesitant to give those up. Will keep Houdini/ Renderman in the back of my mind if I'm not getting the results I want. Thanks @Igor 🙂 @everfresh I've actually watched all those tuts on Cineversity already! Those have been a huuuuuge help. Also really fantastic work - especially dig the comp at 1:53. Make more instructional vids, please Will keep posting updates with results for anyone else interested in doing the same thing

@Igor Short term - would be great if I could figure out a quick alternative to drawing these two assets frame by frame. Best I've been able to do so far has been a combination of key-framed emitters, cloners, etc. in a volume builder / mesher. Also tried using .vdb data from Turbulence FD to drive movement of a bunch of objects, but haven't been able to get the big bulbous cloudy quality of the references - even with weird combinations of smoothers, deformers etc. All good with shading, rendering, and the rest. Just having issues generating the shapes. Long term - Will always be working in the non-photorealistic / toon domain but aiming to do less key-framing and more procedural. Also not scared of a learning curve. Think Houdini is the best option? @Cerbera Thanks for the tip! Hope this makes sense.

Hey Igor That sounds fantastic. Also hoping to figure out how to do this on my own. Grabbing a Houdini trial - If you know of any learning resources/ videos/ tutorials that would help please let me know.

Hey Everyone, Hoping someone can help me figure out the least render intensive method to animate explosions in the style of attached sketches. I figure working with spheres inside some kind of volume mesh would be a good start. I've tried using Turbulence FD/React to drive an emitter with randomized & cloned sphere objects in a volume builder/ metaball - this makes my cpu cry; have also tried shaping emitted objects with keyframed field forces. All of this is either time intensive, resource intensive, or doesn't look quite right. Maybe I'm missing something - I have way more experience in traditional 2D programs. Any of you 3D wizards have any ideas?