Trek Down Lucaithia

Trek Down Lucaithia:
Pitted footfalls
One in front of the other
Slush, slush, slush

This video features Lucira, The Cursed Knight, Treking back down the mountain after defeating the Dragon.

After my last project, I came to the conclusion I wanted to start using external software to bring more realistic simulations into my renders. So, I picked up Embergen, Luquigen, Illugen, and Geogen from Janga FX. I originally was going to use Houdini, but it is currently out of my affordability. I will pick that up sometime in the future.

Anyway, I created this scene using mostly Blender, but was able to import VDBs from Embergen for the snow blowing off of the rocks/terrain, and the snow being kicked by Lucira's feet.

I was really proud of my integration of these realtime volumetric FX into my scene.

Some things I would like to fix in the future. Better "footstep splashes". For this project I made an explosion of dust, brought that VDB into Blender, and then keyframed them to align with the feet. However, next time, I'll use my mesh in Embergen with weight paint masking to properly make an effect for this.

I am much happier with the look of the cape and hair in this render. I used a cloth sim this time and was able to weight paint the mesh to adjust how much different portions are affected. However, I do wish I had added stronger wind to the cape sim. It should be blowing more.

After I rendered out my PNG sequence I brought it into Davinci Resolve for final color grading.

Date: May 10th, 2026
Medium: Blender, Embergen, Davinci Resolve