Meteor

A personal piece. This one was a lot of fun to work on, and I almost cooked my laptop in the process. Damn you, volumetrics.

I simulated the meteor in Embergen and then simply duplicated the VDB a couple times:

For the clouds I used Real Sky, for the sky I used the PSA addon, and for the foreground I used assets from Botaniq. The aurora I made myself with a procedural volume shader.

The boat is modeled from scratch, using two little geo nodes tools that I created for the ropes:

A visually underrepresented but very interesting aspect is the forest in the distance. It uses a point cloud forest generator that I prototyped almost two years ago and never really finished. So I took the opportunity to build some more features around it, like distribution on a strip. Every tree is uniquely generated. And why points? Well, they’re the most simple object you could render, and Blender is super fast at rendering point clouds. If you have enough points, you can approximate almost any shape.

I also worked on optimizing the point clouds by only spawning trees on surfaces that face the camera, and I also include frustum culling to cut down on points even further.

In proper lighting, the forest generator creates something like this:

It scales to about 20 million points, which then looks like this:

However, this is completely unoptimized (these screenshots are from 2023) and I now started implementing LOD falloff and dynamic resolution scaling for the trees. So maybe one day I’ll actually finish this forest side project. We’ll see.