At work I’m often required to fill in shots that we can’t film. In this case the story we were illustrating talked about a small motor vehicle (quad bike) travelling down a lonely road at night. I didn’t want to create a day for night effect with available footage so I made some headlights and grass, then shot it myself.
The first pass included a pair of spheres traveling a path with some animated rotation to simulate riding over rough terrain. But it looked to sterile.
So I added a plane growing some very rough grass as particles. Now when the headlights approach camera they are occluded by stalks of grass, giving a flickering effect to the glare in the lens.
If you want to run over a camera in Blender download the .blend and have a go yourself. see the next post for download.
BTW this is all rendered with Blender Internal as I didn’t have time to resolve the Cycles images, although the free depth of field would have looked nice.
