Need help in creating laser energy beam with blast radius

[rod]

Hi folks, I'm doing a project similar to the scene from Man of Steel where the world engine blasts planet Earth with this giant laser beam. My actual first reference was from Titan AE, where this alien ship destroys planet Earth with laser beam and a blast wave was created, and ground starts to crack. I found some examples on you tube. Please see clips below:

(please goto 0:24) Sorry for the "cartoony reference"

The idea is to have a laser beam hit the ground and a blast radius is created. I'd very much appreciate any information or ideas that you can provide.

Cheers,

Rod

[Solitude]

Have you actually tried anything yet? Are you working with a background plate? or all cg? What are you specifically having trouble with? If you haven't started yet, start by doing some pre-viz. Block it out with simple animated geometry to set up the scene scale / camera / shot composition and go from there, by adding in textures or particles, etc... Then ask a question when you have a specific problem you run into.

[rod]

Thanks for your reply. Sorry, forgot to mention this is my school project in Houdini. Yes it's cg. I actually blocked it out and have a screen shot of it. Since we are 2 months into the program our limits are to use what we are currently taught (maybe go a little over is ok). So the challenge for me now is how to create the blast wave using fluidsource, noise geo, and materials. This is a 2 week project only which started last week and as you can see I have a long way to go on the blast wave.

Here's a link to what I've done so far.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7kpp9052zh25nes/Laser.JPG

https://www.dropbox.com/s/whxc870aep4dd26/Planet1.mov

Thanks again.

[Solitude]

Cool! That's good that you actually have some previs / work done on it. You're on the right track it looks like. I'm not really sure what to suggest... you could add some noise like a mountain sop to the torus rings, and turn those into a volume (look at the cloud tool maybe), and/or use procedural noise on them in the shader... and then depending on the look you have in mind (and whether you are "allowed" to or not), emit particles (lots) off of it as well (use curl noise for some neat motion), rendering those as small semi-transparent points. Look up thinkbox krakatoa to have an idea of what that could look like... but in Houdini. You can find some posts on rendering points on odforce somewhere. Also, a lot of the look can come from post-work, like glows and such.

Edited October 30, 2013 by Solitude

[rod]

Cool! That's good that you actually have some previs / work done on it. You're on the right track it looks like. I'm not really sure what to suggest... you could add some noise like a mountain sop to the torus rings, and turn those into a volume (look at the cloud tool maybe), and/or use procedural noise on them in the shader... and then depending on the look you have in mind (and whether you are "allowed" to or not), emit particles (lots) off of it as well (use curl noise for some neat motion), rendering those as small semi-transparent points. Look up thinkbox krakatoa to have an idea of what that could look like... but in Houdini. You can find some posts on rendering points on odforce somewhere. Also, a lot of the look can come from post-work, like glows and such.

Many thanks man, I'll give it a whirl:)