Dialing in Smoke Trails and RBD Timing for Maximum Impact

As the project moved into its final development stretch, Week 14 was all about FX layering, refinement, and realism. With all the major simulation components in place—RBD destruction, debris, and sparse smoke—the focus shifted toward making each system feel more grounded, better timed, and visually cohesive.

RBD Destruction — Feedback Pass

RBD timing and behavior were once again refined based on updated feedback:

• Several tiles were still collapsing too early, softening the buildup before the impact burst.

• The central ground impact needed a slower unfolding, with delayed fragmentation to sell the dome-like cracking structure described in the reference.

• A visible drop in debris coverage was noted when compared to previous weeks. This was traced back to reduced piece count and scale in debris emission—adjustments will be made to restore coverage in the next phase.

The destruction arc—from pre-impact tension to explosive expansion—is steadily improving, but continued tuning is required to sync the cracking → bulge → burst sequence to the reference.

Smoke Pass Setup — Source Unification Strategy

This week also saw heavy iteration on the smoke trail system. While a sparse Pyro setup was functional from Week 13, it lacked the debris-following trail effect that sells dynamic ground dust behavior.

To address this, I began restructuring the smoke sourcing workflow with a more unified volume sourcing approach:

• Merged debris points and dirt pass points into a single emission point cloud.

• Rasterized them together into one clean VDB volume source, which was then used to drive the Pyro Sparse solver.

Benefits of a Unified Pyro Source

This change introduced several major improvements:

• Consistency: With a shared voxel resolution, the rasterized volume avoids mismatched detail between sources—debris and dirt emit evenly with consistent behavior.

• Efficiency: Fewer Pyro sources reduce node complexity and speed up iteration times during sim previews and DOPNet updates.

• Control: A single rasterized volume makes it easier to apply modifiers (e.g., shaping fields, velocity injection, post-processing) for better smoke art direction.

Despite these benefits, debris trailing behavior is still missing. The source is producing puffs, but not motion-following trails. Further velocity sourcing and temporal delay tuning will be explored to achieve trailing behavior in Week 15.

Lighting and Visualization (Temp Look Pass)

While not a full look development week, I created a basic lighting setup to help visualize the interaction between destruction, debris, and smoke. This early lighting pass was crucial to detect readability issues—such as flat surfaces, debris blending into the ground, and light angle misalignment.

The goal was to preview FX visibility, not render final surfaces.