Planet on fire

[ManSh00ter]

Hi all,

I'm working on a short CG intro movie for a pet project of mine, a sci-fi game modification. As part of the process, I have to create a number of scenes and assets to be used in the final animation, and would love to get some constructive criticism about the various elements I'll post in this thread.

I've been working on the project for a few days now, so I'll post what I got since the beginning, instead of just skipping to the latest stuff, so you can say how everything evolved.

Right now, I'm working on the backdrop scene for the movie - an earth-like planet. The planet should both be eye-catching and clearly in distress. I do all render passes in Softimage, with compositing and post-processing in Nuke.

First render draft of the planet:


Backdrop update 1:
Did some color correction, and also added a more colorful nebula effect to the background. The starfield was also updated to include a greater variety of stars, plus some post-process volumetric rays for the nebula.
Since the camera won't be panning for the majority of scenes, I decided to keep the nebula background as a simple composited image - it will also help distinguish all the debris and objects in the foreground, as opposed to having it against a mostly black starfield.


Backdrop update 2:
Created a simple particle system with ICE using strands, to see how some flaming debris would add to the whole thing.


Backdrop update 3:
Added smoke trails for the flaming "meteors", also reduced their number. Not really happy with how the alpha channel got rendered out for the particles, you can see the screen blend mode doesn't work well for smoke and the meteors are too faint as well. Need to tweak how the particles render out and fix the meteor tails.
Also added a sun in the composition.


Opinions welcome!