ARRIVAL
Short film · in production
Vertical sci-fi short film built entirely in CGI, with volumetric FX, cinematic lighting and original concept art. Its origin still, "The Future of Art", won Best Render at Blendiberia 2025. The vertical version was nominated for Best Animated Short at the 16/9 Festival. The horizontal 16:9 version is in production: rebuilt New York station, own subway car, tracks and tunnels.
The portal: smoke simulated in Mantaflow around a geometry-nodes ring; the tunnel portal of the short was made in EmberGen and is being rebuilt.
- Role
- Writer, director, CGI, FX
- Status
- In production
- Tools
- Blender · Maya · Mantaflow · Geometry nodes · EmberGen · DaVinci Resolve
A volumetric smoke ring that forms while spinning, with a bright blue core and a purple corona that the wind drags backwards. The shape and motion of the smoke come from an animated Geometry Nodes rig that acts as the emitter.
The recipe
Emitter
Geometry Nodes: an animated Curve Circle becomes a tube (Curve to Mesh), is scattered into points and instanced with cubes aligned to the normal at random scale. Spinning the tube profile gives the swirl.
Smoke
Mantaflow: the emitter carries a Fluid Flow modifier that injects smoke into the domain; the simulation is baked to VDB and rendered in Cycles.
Wind
A Wind force field pushes the smoke in one direction and draws the trail that leaves the portal.
Dissolve and shading
Dissolve keeps the trail at a stable length. Volume shading: blue emission in the core, purple absorption outside, 36 mm camera.
Iterations
Problems solved
Migrating to Blender 5
In 5.0 Transform Geometry gained a new input, which shifted every socket index. A driver pointing at rotation by index started translating the emitter forever. Fixed by addressing the socket by name.
Half a portal at render time
The Adaptive Domain was cutting the simulation in half; the viewport hid it because it showed the emitter points. Replaced by a fixed domain sized to the stable length of the dissolving trail.
Cache on local disk
Baking to a cloud-synced folder locked files mid-write. The same bake, frames 1 to 500 with noise, completed first time on a local disk.
In the station: the tunnel portal, made in EmberGen
Planet portal: Blender 4.5 and 5.2 · Mantaflow · Geometry Nodes · Cycles. Station portal: EmberGen
