Confined Spaces
Confined Spaces is a volume simulation and shading/rendering experiment.
Inspiration / Reference
Inspiration for the environment came from research into exhibition spaces. I’d been experimenting with containing volumes inside closed vdb colliders, and the following were natural references.
This coloured smoke reference inspired the coloured volume aspect of the project, but when I realised my laptop at the time couldn’t handle voxels anywhere close to that density, I went in the less detailed, darker direction of Arrival.
Volume Simulation
The following is an initial test from when I was learning how to colour smoke, alongside the final sim. To create the burst of energy on impact, I transferred an emission attribute from the container geo to the emitter sphere, which accumulated in strength with a solver over the surrounding frames, and was then piped into the shader. This was then diffused by the temperature.
Compositing
Most of the aesthetic was defined in comp. I rendered the volume with rgb diffuse shading, and an emissive pass for the collisions. I remapped the values to reds, oranges, whites and blacks, then punched up the highlight and emission values to properly interact with my opticals setup (glows, glints, flares, halation etc.).
The black smudging on the interior was achieved in comp by running noise through the rest position pass, and darkening the diffuse/spec contribution of the interior walls. I also created the smudged glass by placing noise on cards, then running the highlights of the comp behind it through a diffusion setup, which I added on top of everything.
I ended up handling motion blur in post due to rendering constraints on the 3D side. This had the benefit of smoothing out some of the voxel stepping in the sim.
R&D
The following simulation was developed along the way, when I was testing out the 2D solver.
These were shading tests while learning the ropes in Redshift. Arnold is still leagues ahead in the volumes area, it’s hard to get past the fluffy volume look.
