A small demonstration what kind of effects we can do these days - some of you might have noticed that I've been quite busy developing Vostok-1 further over the last days, and part of what I've been focusing on are the entry visuals.
Here we go, the capsule and TDU in space, all shiny metal:
TDU separated and entering the atmosphere, glow just starting at the stagnation point:
Now the capsule heat shield starts to glow in earnest:
The plasma tail hides what I want to show, so here's around Mach 6 after the plasma has disappeared, still glowing...
... and a close-up reveals that the metal is no longer shiny but charred by the fierce heat:
... and braking parachute out, ready to deploy main chute: