Another FX test for you guys! I wanted to have this finished last week, but it took a little bit longer. I have created an updated version of my transporter effect.
The original effect can be viewed here. This also shows off the sequence initiators on the transporter console, where I set the material up so that you can swipe up and down.
New effect:
This time around I rendered using cycles, using my recently built transporter room.
The effect was created using 3 render layers and 2 pre-rendered image sequences
Render layer 1 : This layer contained the transporter room along with the character
Render layer 2 : This layer contained the character and was used for added lighting for the character as well as served to generate an alpha channel for the character. The collection that contains the set being set as a holdout, and indirect. The alpha pass for the character was later used for compositing the beam effect by subtracting the alpha from those assets.
Render Layer 3 : Just the transporter room
Image sequence 1: The falling down streaks when the beam is first activated. This was pre-rendered as an image sequence. (I re-used this from my original effect.) In TNG this effect was achieved by dropping down fiber optical lights.
Image sequence 2: Swirly particles. This was another pre-rendered sequence. I created a particle system from a sphere where the particles were effected by a vortex
After that I did a lot of compositing nodes, where the lighting from Render layer 2 added to the character on render layer 1, and then used a mix node to animate a crossfade down to render layer 3, with the image sequences composited above both render layers with the alpha from render layer 2 subtracting from the alpha of the image sequences.
The reason why I pre-rendered out the image sequences was so that in the future it would be quick and easy to re-use and would save on render times.
Because of how many render layers, and all of the compositing, it took about 4-5 minutes to render per frame on my RTX 3080, I think all of the compositing might have slowed it down some too because this laptop is a quad core CPU (Blender uses the CPU for compositing.)