While working on my new showreel I decided to revisit an old animation from 2016 of a red biplane flying through the clouds. Back then It was a painted scene with a plane built out of solids and masks in After Effects, very much hacked together. 8 years later my work is primarily 3D and so is the scene! Clouds generated with Embergen, the plane and scene built in Blender, and only the final compositing in After Effects.
To save render time on the volumetrics I exported the Embergen sims as EXRs with a depth channel. Cutting render time down from hours to seconds, while still having some depth in the image billboards.
The original 2016 After Effects Animation