[Update] Perfect Parking Spot - Shot 4: Finishing up destruction, test compositing and getting ready for smoke simulation (Patreon)

All done with the last of the rigid body simulation stuff for this shot, along with a bunch of leftover destruction-related bits and pieces.

This has made this shot rather resource intensive so I’ve also taken this as a chance to test out some compositing ahead of diving into smoke simulation stuff (since the latter will require compositing into the final render for the setup I have in mind).

Testing out compositing

If you’re unfamiliar with compositing it's basically all about combining separate images (whole or in parts) together via layering, masking (cropping an image to a specific area) and various visual effects.

One of the key use-cases for compositing is getting around hardware and performance limitations.

This shot for example has gotten very resource intensive now. While it’s probably possible for me to render a frame of it all in one go it would push my pc to its limit. So instead I can break that frame down into parts, which take less resources to render individually, and then I can combine those back together for the same end results.

This is what I’ve done for the test composite in this update (sort of).

I have a full diffuse pass to start with, which is the whole scene rendered with a material override which forces all the meshes to use the same basic diffuse shader:

This basically gives me a quick and easy shadow pass for the whole shot and the material override means that no resources are being spent on computing all those unique shaders or storing all their associated image textures in memory either.

This isn't exactly a 'physically accurate' way of handling lighting and (more importantly) also misses all the shadows generated from things like normal maps, but at least for the latter this is something that can be salvaged back from the partial renders coming up.

Next is breaking up the shot into parts, which I've rendered with shadows disabled, and creating associated masks to prevent overlapping in the wrong places:

Once all the parts are put back together I can combined them with the full diffuse pass to get the correct lighting and shadows back (and then further colour correction can come afterwards):

Now, because I'm using Blender's viewport for rendering this test composite I can't actually combine the diffuse pass in properly (which is why the result looks a bit 'off' compared to previous previews). When it comes time for the final render and composite I'll need to break these partial renders down into even further layers to be able to do that correctly.

That covers the broad strokes of what I've done with compositing so far, but I'll be revisiting the topic again once the smoke simulation stuff is finished too.

What’s coming up next

So, three things left to finish up (two big and one small) to get this shot ready for final rendering and compositing.

First is the smoke simulation, which is going to consist of a bunch of isolated small to medium size sims for each of the three main buildings, the ground, and those fire hydrants I brought up in the last update.

Second is adding in some micros, though I will be keeping things a bit sparse on this front both for time and resource/performance reasons.

Last thing is fixing some issues with the generated traffic in this scene. While the geo-node setup works as expected for viewport rendering, when it comes to the actual rendering it's been breaking for some reason, so I'll have to fix (or replace) it.

2026 is almost here!

2026 is right around the corner and it actually marks the 10 year anniversary of the first macro/micro animation I ever posted online. I'd been rolling around the idea of revisiting it as a special project, but the year has flown by while I've been working on these two animations and adding a third on top doesn't seem like a wise course of action.

So, depending on how things go progress-wise with the next update I'm probably going to start prioritising work on one of my current animations with the aim of completing it and opening up space for that anniversary project.

I'll post a bit more about it all when the new year comes in, but for now I hope what remains of 2025 treats you all well and I thank you all for the support you've shown me through out it.