explosions

[treed]

This explosion is made with Afterburn, and is based off of a tutorial by Alan McKay on 3dluvr.com. I messed around with the gradients and noise values until I got it the way I wanted it to look. After doing some tests I pretty much know how to create similar effects. Go with Afterburn if you want to create some serious effects. It can way more than just explosions. Here are some good websites for explosions.

http://www.3dluvr.com/content/article/78

http://www.3dluvr.com/content/article/70

http://www.3dm-mc.com/tutorials/explore2/

http://www.3dm-mc.com/tutorials/blast/

Makers of Afterburn

http://www.afterworks.com/




"Curious but optimistic"

[BrandonD]

I've got some Afterburn explosions here as well. Some are nearly four years old, so cut me some slack ;)

http://www.particlefx.com/animation/106_03_Fireball.mov

http://www.particlefx.com/animation/ab-explode.avi

http://www.particlefx.com/animation/Missile-Explode-Test1.mov

Towards the end of my reel from last year, there's some AB explosion/fire tests:

http://www.particlefx.com/orphanage/

[treed]

Hey Brandon, do you have any good Afterburn tutorials that you made. I'm sure they would probably be the best ones on the web. Also, how did you make the teapot explode? Was it a parray with afterburn particles?



treed

[BrandonD]

I did tutorials years ago when Afterburn first came out, but haven't since. Alan McKay's done plenty recently. www.3dluvr.com/machette

The teapot was PArray and a second particle system for AB. Quick and easy.

[monkeydonut]

Hi Brandon,
I just wanted to pick your brain about the settings you used for those explosions. I've been playing with my copy of afterburn for months and I still can't get that photoreal look 100% of the time.

I understand all the settings I think, but just can't quite get it 100% right as far as explosions are concerned.

Could you explain how you light your explosions, and how you use the explode daemon to achieve that gaseous glow that seems to permeate the core of them? (I'm using afterburn 2.5c - what did you use for your examples here?)

I will enclose some pictures of my explosions so you can get an idea.

this one is still very much WIP ( temp composite + lighting etc)

[monkeydonut]

couple more pics

[monkeydonut]

one more

[Arnage]

With all those afterburn examples i just had to post a test made with max standard stuff (Link (http://www.student.io.tudelft.nl/io1178512/explosiontest9.avi)). This one is quite old and i know that a sphere with a bomb space warp has been done before but it demonstrates that explosions don't always need to be done with afterburn.

btw. They are just a couple of facing particles with a texture and a bright light

[monkeydonut]

that's pretty cool...any chance of posting the .max file so I can take a look ?

Alex

[Arnage]

Sure, here (http://www.student.io.tudelft.nl/io1178512/explosion.max) is the max file, it's nothing special but if it can help go ahead.

(You might need to download the electric texture from blur, i might have used it)

[wscates]

These two were done using the mesher method with faceing particles. Link01 (http://www.thecellardoorexperiment.com/images/Explo01.avi)
Link02 (http://www.thecellardoorexperiment.com/images/Explo02.avi)


Will Scates

[monkeydonut]

I liked those Will, they were pretty darn cool - especially the second one.

I'm definitely going to be experimenting with facing particles more, but eventually I will need to take advantage of the true 3d nature of the afterburn volumetrics for moving around them etc.

Brandon are you around to answer? It would really help me out a lot.

Thanks
Alex

[wscates]

Thanks Alex. The first one was a huge pain, for some reason no matter what I did a hole would form in the center of the explosion on the right. So it was fun with masking in After Effects to cover it up. If I had more time I would have loved to figure out why that happened. The second one was pretty straight foward. Just a little color correction and scale in AE. Faceing particles should work fine if you just want to move around the explosion, however if you want to go thourgh the system thats when a true voulmetrics shine.

Will Scates

[monkeydonut]

bump... anyone know if brandon is still hanging around here ?

[monkeydonut]

ok, just in case anyone was in my position...

I did some playing around with the xplode daemon and finally worked out how to get the effect in brandon's explosions of that central glow/ hot core effect.

Basically it seems obvious now (and originally was how I thought the daemon worked), but my problem was that I was always working on the premise that the centre of the gradient was the core of the explosion - all due to the explode.agt that is provided in the examples....which certainly seems to operate that way. I finally got around to just playing with explode and working out how it affects the explosion.

I figured that it must go left to right along the gradient (if interpolating from 0.0 to 1.0 based on part.age.)..much like the other gradients in afterburn. So simply setting a bright yellow-white on the left and fading through red to near black, and tweaking the multiplier got me the results I wanted. I will post a screenshot when I'm back home.

This seems strange though because the provided gradient is so different (and is still read 0.0 to 1.0) but can give awesome results too.

Anyone here an explode daemon guru, and able to explain it better than I? This is just based on my experience and I'm on 2.5c.

One other query was with the afterburn glow effect, it seems for any reasonable explosion you have to heavily wind the glow down so it really only affects the bright initial part of the explosion, but it's hard to get the timing right just using the curves provided (I end up having to set the high limit super low, and there's not much room to tweak it gently). Any other technique's?

Also, how do people light their explosions to amplify the photorealism side of things?


Alex

[Ronski]

aha my favourite subject :scream:
Here's one (http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/kieron/gallery58.htm) I did years ago with Pyrocluster but I've been itching to do some with Afterburn for ages.

I've also been thinking of writing an article about explosions, I've been collecting loads of reference Avis of things blowing up for a while & wanted to do an Anatomy of an Explosion kind of thing, thinking about what's really going on, whats the fuel petrol/uranium etc, air movement etc. Would anyone be interested in this or would people just rather see tutorials on the subject?

Cheers,
Kieron

[monkeydonut]

Yeah I'd be interested in it....though at the moment my holy grail is the ability to somehow get that rolling fireball animation....see intro to T2 - the big fireball they overcranked ... beautiful imagery.

I have thinking particles, and that has a 'rolling' dynamics operator, though I haven't got it to work in this way, so that might not be what it's for (I doubted it anyway). In any case, that won't work with afterburn. Perhaps it could be done with Digimation's Particle Studio? I don't have Pflow, maybe that is a possible tool for it though?

Beyond PAINSTAKINGLY setting up lots of space warps to simulate the convection currents, or perhaps have the particles loosely follow splines (which I used to make a properly animating nuclear explosion / mushroom cloud)...I'm not sure how to achieve that.

re: the physics and chemistry of high and low explosives and nuclear fission/fusion reactions... it's a complicated subject if you really want to take a close look at it, but I think I understand it in fair detail. I'd be interested to hear anything more anyone can tell me about it though / share what I know.

viva l'afterburn

[monkeydonut]

bump

[urgaffel]

I'm interested in how you get that rolling effect too... Spacewarps are probably the way, just don't know which to use. Anyone got some pointers?

[Ronski]

It's a shame that Afterburn & Thinking Particles don't work together, with thinking Particles you can use a Motion Inheritance operator on a rotating dummy to add roll to particles, here's an example anim (http://www.groundzerofx.com/Cebas/tests/Turbulent_particles_preview_DIVX.avi), basically there are a row of hidden dummies either side rotating which pull the particles around. I couldn't find the scene but here's a basic TP setup of the same thing.
http://www.groundzerofx.com/Cebas/tests/ControllerSetup_MI.jpg

I'd say Particle Flow is the best way to go I believe the Afterburn update for it will be (or has?) released very soon. The big problem I've found is to resolve the particle motion with the round volumes created via Afterburn or Pyrocluster, i.e. the cotton wool ball effect. You can have motion on each volume work well but there's no single volume which is what the fireball is. Unless you use some other kind of technology like AURA (http://www.chaosgroup.com/software/AURA/) which looks very cool from the makers of Phoenix.

Cheers,
Kieron

[monkeydonut]

OMG colour me seriously impressed with how aura is coming along.

I saw the pictures before but wasn't on a fast enough connection to check the videos... now I have :eek: :eek:

I like the rolling in the TP example... is there anyway we can get that with Digimation particle studio, or native max particles.

I remember that awesome looking explosion Allan mckay did for seconds to spare. I never saw the movie, only the screengrab from it, but that must have had some realistic dynamics to it.

How did you do that Allan? Methodical placement of space warps ?

[amckay]

Kieron, you need to do that explosion article :)

Seriously you need to start doing some more particle stuff! Move away from the textures! AWAY FROM THE TEXTURES
:)))

Fireball was max 3.1 and AB (it was a shmaya studio no doubt). It was more in the shader than anything else. I used parray and some spacewarps to make it twist and curl a bit but had to keep it fairly tight. There was lots of secondary explosions of debris allover the place which kind of added to it.
Kind of suprised I was able to pull that shot off... I had plans to make an improved fireball with pflow for my non exsistant DVD...

[monkeydonut]

Thanks for the reply Allan. So how did you make the shader for that explosion? Did you use the explode daemon at all?

I have an explosion done now that I wouldn't mind showing, I just have to get it hosted first, but I'll post it when I do.

Alex

[amckay]

lil.... well a tad drunk right now ;)
um yeah the explosion daemon played a huge role in it. the key was to balance between the firey explosion shader and the contrasty black bits to give it the detail necessary.

it was a bit of a pain because it holds up well up until the end, but as it hits the camera it looks too flat and 2D, purely cause of the explosion deamon is more of a composite, so it doesn't have the same rolling look that a self shadowing shader would.

I'll post a tut or something sometime on it. Just trying to finish up a bunch of features all at the same time right now, so the sooner I finish the more time before xmas I'll have to devote to some online tuts, and my dvd as well as catching up on much needed sleep :)

[monkeydonut]

haha, thanks for the speedy reply.

This is the holy grail of tutorials for me, and I suspect many others. To get cgi explosions looking that good in my work would be amazing.


In the meantime, you mention that the explode daemon was crucial in transitioning from the firey shader to the smoke. My question is, what exactly do you mean? I can only see the possibility of transitioning from one colour through to others...can you somehow link the explode daemon to external shaders/materials ?

Thanks!
Alex
p.s. I will post that avi as soon as I work out somewhere to host it

[amckay]

well crucial in palette an in what it does. You could achieve the results necessary with compositing or other extreme results, but afterburn is soft and mellow, explosion blows out the colours and makes areas really bright as well as controls it's blending quite efficiently. There's definitely better shaders out there than explosion deamon, but not for afterburn.

Basically you want areas to blow out like fire rather than be soft fluffy and look like cloud. So the explosion daemon does this better than just standard afterburn could...

Ih ope that made sense, it's the best I can do while liqored up :)
Damn switz women can hold their beer..

[monkeydonut]

hehehe :) , so you say you used Max 3.1 and AB.... is that all you used to achieve the whole effect?

I understand what you mean... I generally use AB + explode daemon. I have my explode daemon set up so that the gradient goes through the yellowy-white (RGB = 243, 226, 167) through orangey-red to black, from left to right (i.e. not like the example explode.agt which seems to have the bright part centred at 0.54 in the gradient). This seems to give the hot core effect I like.

Then I generally ramp that fairly quick, and use something like trapcode's shine in the compositing program to give the initial firey blast a little more punch and blow out the colours a little bit.

Essentially what I'm interested in is exactly how you used shaders to make that shot, and exactly what they were?
Is there an .avi of that shot anywhere?

Cheers
Alex

[amckay]

shoot me an email at amckay@allanmckay.com and I'll try and make a quick example over the next few days.

if I don't get back to you within the next lets say week, email me until I do... although I'll try and make a quick example that at least captures the basic idea of it..


cheers!

[monkeydonut]

Will do Allan, thanks a lot!

[TBKoen]

thx :thumbsup:

[treed]

Allan, I can't wait for your DVD on particle flow/shaders/Afterburn stuff. Thats where I'm really going to boost my knowledge. :applause:

[amckay]

yeah unfortunately scooby 2 and paycheck have taken up most of my time until recently. But I'm hoping once I get back from the discreet tour in China next week I'll be able to devote most of my time to finishing it up. Unfortunately I have to move back to LA in January so I'm going to have to get my arse into gear to get it out the door :) but so far there's more content than I had ever planned for so it should definitely be a pretty big wealth of knowledge.

[treed]

Aww sweet, your working on Paycheck. I can't wait to see that movie and say to my friends, "I know the guy that did the VFX for that movie." :thumbsup: Ohh btw, today I made two vid tuts on PFlow. One on the Intro to it, and one on how to set up Collisions. I owe a big thanks to you and Brandon Davis on those. :)

[Nima-3dman]

My latest work with afterburn for an explosion is here:
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=975540#post975540

*I edited the link*
ragards
Nima NF

[treed]

The link doesen't work.

[Nima-3dman]

Sorry,I edited the link... try again

[treed]

Thats really nice work. Did you use the explode daemon?

[Nima-3dman]

yeah, I used explode daemon, but you should know that for better result I used Animation Flow Curves(AFC) for it...

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