Done some more work on the challenge, while I was taking a break from some other work. Now the node tree looks even more hideous and I should really clean it up and make it a bit optimized.

I fixed the lightning on the pots (Photoshop + Clone tool = awesome) and fixed the dress a bit (it was flickering). After that I went working on the smoke. I wasn’t satisfied with the look of it so I put a lot of more nodes into it, and I kinda came up with quite a nice feel to it. But I still have to work out the animation of the warps.

I then put it all together and am now rendering a pre-render for the CC test #2, which I also adjusted to not flicker like that and adjusted the vignette.

I think it’s coming together nicely and it looks like it will be done in time.

Here’s a test render of the smoke

Watch vfx308_test_005.mov