Day 28

Today, I continued working on the meteor trail. This time I am working on the lighting of it. A couple of versions:


Version 1: With heavy environment lighting.


Version 2: Tweaking environment lighting and changed color of sunlight.


Version 3: Overall lighting made brighter.

I then asked Mr Ari for comments on my overall scene.

He told me there were a couple of problems that needs to be worked on:
1- The meteor trail should spread out more instead of it being almost a straight line.
2- The tip of the smoke( which is supposed to be fire ) isn't hot enough. Glow could be added in to enhance it.
3- The smoke trail's density is too consistent. Allow the smoke to fade off at the back.
4- The smoke flickers too much. It should be more of a static thing after the meteor is "lit".

Just in case:

Below is my first render with some basic lights:




I started working on problem 1. And I solved it I think. Below is how it looks:



Next, I moved on to problem 3:

I managed to get some alpha in my scene by adding a color node inside pops and adding an alpha ramp to it.

I managed to get the viewport alpha to work and it somehow looks like this:



But the problem is when I render this out it looks exactly the same as before.

I therefore suspect that the shader is the problem. I went into the shader and did some random test.

I added a spline ramp to the surface alpha channel inside the shader, hoping it will work.



But no...It didn't.

Can anyone help me?