Week 1

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May 10th, 2025
Things to fix moving towards week 2:
-Reduce abrupt disturbance appearing in the back end of smoke
-Increase substeps of pyro sim as well as decrease voxel size to reduce blocky look
-Add more noise to the smoke to add the shakiness to its dispersion like in the reference
-Continue adjusting solver settings to try and match reference more
-Add negative frames so there is a smoke trail present at the beginning of the shot
-Make smoke appear less green (fix lighting)
-Remove "United Airlines" from plane material
With that set up, I went back to actually set up the base pyro sim. I opted for the SOP level pyro solver purely due to me feeling more comfortable with it. Along with that I created a VDB for the plane wing to use as a collision object for the smoke.
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May 9th, 2025
I moved away from the trail for a moment to begin the general Solaris layout as well as working on the materials for the plane.
Next I began laying out where the particles were going to be sourced. I blasted everything except the engine I wanted the smoke to emit from and used a pop net to source points to flow out of that area as it moves. This will be used for the pyro.
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May 8th, 2025
Pre-Production:
I started by downloading a free DC-10 model from Sketchfab. certain meshing issues aside, it should work for what I am using it for. I prepared a test animation for the camera and most importantly the plane. Getting the plane movement right is vital as I will use this movement to track my particle emission later on.
For my final project in VFX 428, I have chosen to recreate the plane scene from World War Z.  My goal for this project is to demonstrate a realistic smoke trail emitting from a planes faulty engine, as shown in the reference.
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