So the Slo-Mo guys on Youtube recently got their hands on a cannon. I thought the footage looked awesome so I wanted to try my hand at recreating the shot.
It wasn’t hugely complicated to do. I played around with a few different techniques but once I realised that in order to get the effect to move correctly in real time (very very fast, creating the rolling plumes of smoke) byt introducing a huge aount of substeps I realised I could make use of all that extra data.
By using a nifty but of Hscript I was able to take a 50 frame animation and export it as a much longer sequence by writing each substep to file as part of the sequqence. This not only gave me a very slow motion sim, but one that could be internally retimed in housini to create the “Warpy speedy uppy slowy downy” effect.
From there it was a case of putting together a shader for the effect to get the initial fireball that transitions to smoke.
I was quite pleased with the final result!