For a while I’ve had a taste for this kind of things, just recently I learned what a “mooring tower” was and had to recreate this scene. Also I’ve been a Led Zeppelin for a while so it’s been imprinted in my brain for a while.
I found this article and was completely astonished as it was brand new information to me, then I got to this zine about the Hindenburg and a new 3D project was born.
For the zeppelin model I used some blueprints although it was too late for me when I realized the back fins were different, I fixed them a bit but didn’t care much as they were going to get destroyed in the future. I made the cockpit and landing wheels somewhat accurate because that was not going to be the important part of this project, although I really felt like making the whole interior structure just for fun. Then I made the mooring tower and downloaded a bunch of people from sketchfab plus a truck and turned the people into a particle system to have a crowd. The it was time to work on the Hindenburg so I removed a bunch of faces fro the mesh and rearranged the vertex to simulate the explosion, then I took the back of the whole model and bent it. For the explosion simulation itself I began making a regular POOF, but it wasn’t good enough, then followed a tutorial and the end result didn’t look quite good + was extremely heavy for my computer, then I downloaded a trial for EmberGen and was kind of getting somewhere but couldn’t really get a cool explosion, I decided to go for a VDB and be done with it. For the extra explosion splash I sculpted smoke paths and turned the mesh to volume and it was looking decent until Eevee couldn’t decide between crashing at working harder than Cycles at 150 samples or just crashing all together, the mesh to volumes weren’t looking dense at all in Eevee and looked great in Cycles, so I made a turntable in Eevee and rendered stills in Cycles.
Since the beginning I panned on focusing solely in the explosion and not the textures.