Do you want to make a nice, powerful looking thruster, but you don't want to deal with complex flame or particle simulations, so you end up settling for a bit of emission, maybe a lens flare and a LOT of glow in post? This series will help alleviate that stress on you and your GPU.

The course will take you through the process of creating this thruster element from start to finish, mostly inside Blender, but with a bit of After Effects sprinkled in. 

Not only that, but this course will introduce you to a new workflow for creating industry-level realistic simulated fire elements that don’t bog down your system with any smoke sims or volumetrics. 

After this course, you’ll be able to create a convincing thruster element, but you can also apply the skills and techniques you’ll have learned in order to create any kind of fire, energy or heat distortion FX, from propane torches to the most powerful ion engines and beyond.

You’ll also get the full scene included with the course, including the fully textured and rigged drone model, the sci-fi city HDRI and both the fresh and completed versions of the demo scene, so you can follow along or examine the final product in detail. All materials included are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Feel free to use these assets in your projects, even commercial.

The details: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

You do need both Blender and After Effects in order to follow along for the entire course, but the finished animated texture we create in After effects is also included on its own, so you don’t necessarily need to have After effects to be able to follow along with the Blender portions.

YOUR INSTRUCTOR

Jackson Roberts- CG generalist and filmmaker, RISD alum and USC grad student

Software used:

Blender 2.93

Adobe after effects 2021