explosion using sprites

[artology132]

really i don't know , but try the cloud particle i thnkit will work ok for you

[MartinRomero]

Thanks a lot artology132 (http://forums.cgsociety.org/member.php?u=110155)

Thanks Artology132. I thought about what you said but, it has to be done using sprites for the game. What I will do is, create a simple explosion using fluid dynamics in Maya, then export out a sequence of 16 or 20 frames then map those to my sprites for the explosion. I was actually looking at Unreal Tournament 3 engine and that's kind of what they have, the explosion in the game are really Cool.

later

Martin Romero

[Htogrom]

You can use fluid simulation to calculate movement of the particles. In that way you can get nice swirling movement.

Even today there's very few images in sprite animations in games. Reason is GPU memory limit. For example call of duty 4 has very nice looking explosions, but still there's 4-5 sprites in whole blast animation. Sprites are also rotating simulating swirling plus you can hardly notice that there's just blending between images.

I also noticed that in most of the games explosions look very poor. Reason is not hardware limitations but only the quality of the sprite images itslef.
First to get good explosion use good images. The best thing would be to put actual explosion footage on sprites. Also many people make explosions very orange. Keep in mind that most movie explosions are mainly white. Blending from white to orange and red is much quicker than most people make it.
Nice thing I noticed in call of duty 4 explosions is that blooming effect on the start, and bit of camera shake. It's obvius that they put a lot of study on the subject this time.

Also good explosion is nothing without light effects. Watch some nuclear explosion clips on youtube. It goes like this:

1. We have some field, afternoon
2. Explosion occurs, strong flash
3. When flash is fading, on ground there's no more light from sky, light from explosion totaly overides the daylight, it looks like it is the only source of light.
4. Fading back to normal light conditions.

So good thing to try is to change color balance in frambuffer in the moment of explosion.

[MartinRomero]

Thanks a lot Spellbound (http://forums.cgsociety.org/member.php?u=278029).

I really apreciate your input on this matter. I have been looking at the Unreal Tournament 3 explosions, to study the way they did it and you are totally right 5 to 8 sprites do the trick. I have also notice in the Unreal Engine that they rely or use a lot of procedural shaders for explosions, blasts, character's spaw, well, you name it. Anyway, I have started my explosion and the first thing I did was to to create an explosion using Fluid Dynamics in Maya, then I applied a sequence of 16 images to the sprites and it's looking really good already, good enough for Next Gen games at least. Once again I do appreciate your comments.

Cheers
Martin Romero

[Htogrom]

Thanks.

I hope soon me and my friend will make one huge video tutorial, one vfx shot full of explosions, particles. I would like to record real project, so people will see how things work in production. Also we will cover blastcode, houdini, realflow, maybe renderman...

[MartinRomero]

Hey Spellbound,

Besides from the 3Dbuzz UT3 tutorials, there is not much out there that covers "fx" on games. I think that as soon I as feel more comfortable with the Unreal Engine 3. I will be able to post some tutorials.

Any way, Looking forward to watching yours. Good luck on that and thanks again for your comments.

btw, do you have a website?



Cheers

Martin Romero

[optimus008]

To do an explotions I would just make a simple spirt image sequence using fluids.

Just make a non-dynamic fluid explosion using the fluids texture controls.

Then make an Omin omitter, when keying the rate make sure to change the keys from spline to step.

Then just throw in a rand expression into the particles oppacityPP this should give you a decent look.

Hope this points you in a good direction.

[MartinRomero]

Hey optimus008,

Thanks for your comment. I got the project done a few days ago. I just needed to know how many particles to map onto a sequence of sprites particles just because I am not an expert when it comes to game stuff yet. Most of the stuff I have done pretty much has been for TV or film .I have been working on Fluids dynamics in Maya as well as max for a while now but, kind of new with the UT3 Engine.

Actually the way I went about the explosion was by creating a dynamic explosion. Then I mapped the "sequence" onto the sprites and it looks pretty sweet.
thanks again,

cheers

Martin

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