A rain-soaked VFX shot of a space craft touching down in a neon-lit street, made over a few evenings in my spare time. I hadn't done many composited VFX shots before, so it was a good chance to polish some habits.
Prep: a sci-fi wallpaper I saw online inspired the scene, and I gathered references in PureRef. In hindsight, more prep would have made the process easier.
Models and environment: the street comes from Kitbash3D kits and the craft from CG Trader, so I could go straight to building the scene — about 5–6 hours including prep. I first planned skyscrapers in the background, but a street-level ground shot with a shallow focus worked much better and keeps the eye on the craft.
Rain: the Baga Rain Generator add-on for Blender adds rain and drops to an object in one click, a second add-on adds water trails to the craft's materials, and a particle system with dynamic paint on a ground plane makes the ripples.
Fog and lighting: the fog is a cube with a volumetric material. Lighting is a New York street HDRI, emissive planes above and below the craft, a red point light at its side for colour variation, and a few point lights in the background.
Rendering: the longest stage — 12 to 14 hours as a PNG sequence. EXR would have given more room in the grade, and rendering separate view layers would have let me correct the background, midground, foreground and craft independently.
Editing and compositing: done in DaVinci Resolve Studio, with rain overlays from fxelements.com — including distant heavy rain blown by the wind, which adds a lot of realism.
Lessons I'm keeping: always use view layers and holdouts for VFX shots — it's standard, not a nice-to-have; set samples per view layer (the craft at 1000, the background at 150); and always prep well.
