Environmental Fire Damage Concept – Geometry Nodes Experimentation
This section details an ambitious environmental effect initially designed to give the character a strong narrative and visual personality—setting the ground ablaze as they run and causing significant environmental destruction.
- Concept Overview:
- The idea was to have fire spread organically beneath the character’s feet, visually communicating raw power and impact on the world.
- Technical Approach:
- Used Blender’s Geometry Nodes to procedurally remove and delete ground geometry dynamically.
- The geometry deletion was driven by a Voronoi pattern combined with Perlin noise:
- Perlin noise was chosen for its organic, natural randomness, perfectly simulating how fire might spread unevenly over terrain.
- Voronoi helped define the clustered, fractal-like fragmentation of burnt earth.
- 2D Fire Sprites:
- Since the painterly paint filter did not register planes (P-L-A-N-E-S) used to generate 2D fire sprites, I created custom hand-animated fire effects to overlay and complement the geometry destruction.
- These sprites were designed to grow out of the ground as flames.
- Outcome:
- Despite the scale and innovation of this effect, it was ultimately not used in the final animation.
- The complexity and resource demands, along with narrative shifts, led me to explore other, more focused visual storytelling methods.
Reflection
This experiment expanded my understanding of procedural environment destruction and highlighted the challenges of integrating 2D effects within a painterly 3D style. Although unused, the techniques and lessons learned will inform future projects aiming for large-scale dynamic environments.
(Quick note that I also hand animated 2d smoke too)