Uploaded September 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Jason renders emission, smoke, and normal maps for a volume, and then constructs sprite sheets for use in game engines. Part of a 10-lesson workshop for aspiring technical artists. Expand this description for download links and more.

00:00 - Intro
00:07 - Rendering the explosion (Arnold)
00:30 - Loading our cache
01:30 - Explaining the graph
02:30 - Creating volume normals
05:20 - Final VDB cache
05:45 - Shaders & rendering
06:35 - Rendering a cache using Arnold
09:00 - AOVs
11:15 - Back into Bifrost
12:00 - Caching the SDF
13:00 - Caching for render/output to Arnold volume
14:00 - Checking the cache
16:00 - Changing to normal shader and rendering again
17:20 - Positioning the volume for sprite render

Download the scenes, compounds, slides, lesson plans and other files to follow along or adapt for your own curriculum: areadownloads.autodesk.com/wdm/maya/bifrost_bootcamp_lesson_6_files.zip

Explosions for Games - UE engine video: youtube.com/watch?v=Hc4xkXeIJs8

OpenVDB Unreal Importer: github.com/eidosmontreal/unreal-vdb

Free Flipbook + Optical flow spritesheet generator: facedownfx.com

Slate Tutorials:
youtube.com/watch?v=zykKhdMUTwg
youtube.com/watch?v=gkljBc7bdew