[Nuke]

ive been redoing all the effects for nukemod, replacing the old 128^2 indexed color bitmaps with 512^2 24 bit dds ones. somewhere along the line il need to redo the old explosion and particle anis as well. i was curious as to how the pros go about animating realistic looking fire and explosion effects? il probibly use a 256 ^2 dds based effs which at 15 fps would come to about a half a meg a second. its just a metter of rendering the things.

[WMCoolmon]

Something that looked cool in Homeworld2 was a split-second of smoke after flak.

[Grug]

It's somewhat difficult to do animated effects in general I find. Apparantly Combustion has some tools in there to make explosions and fire and what not, but I never got around to installing it.

These days I do it the hard way. Frame by frame in photoshop. =/
It makes you more aware of the amount of memory that each frame and animation uses up however, as you have to painstakingly draw each one...

If you find some easier ways to make explosions and what not, please give me a heads up though mate.

[aldo_14]

There's a **** hot blurlib fire library (for free; the creators are a bunch of professional CGI animators, I think they did that Rockfish thing) floating about for Max somewhere.

http://www.sectorgame.com/aldo/media/mt1.avi you could obviously do much better by spending more than 10 minutes with it, of course.

EDIT; sorted link.  Cheers for pointing that out.

[Wanderer]

aldo, please remove ";" from the link... now it gives only 404s if clicked.

[Nuke]

There's a **** hot blurlib fire library (for free; the creators are a bunch of professional CGI animators, I think they did that Rockfish thing) floating about for Max somewhere.

http://www.sectorgame.com/aldo/media/mt1.avi you could obviously do much better by spending more than 10 minutes with it, of course.

EDIT; sorted link. Cheers for pointing that out.

i found the plugin but it was for max 3, i have max 6 and it doesnt want to work in it. got anythng else?

[aldo_14]

There's a **** hot blurlib fire library (for free; the creators are a bunch of professional CGI animators, I think they did that Rockfish thing) floating about for Max somewhere.

http://www.sectorgame.com/aldo/media/mt1.avi you could obviously do much better by spending more than 10 minutes with it, of course.

i found the plugin but it was for max 3, i have max 6 and it doesnt want to work in it. got anythng else?
EDIT; sorted link. Cheers for pointing that out.

I only have the library for v4, so I can't help you there.  Um, maybe you could find something on the blur website; sory I can't be more helpful, but it's been ages since I last was ferreting around for plugins.

[Nuke]

i found it but they really didnt have any plugins on it.

[aldo_14]

i found it but they really didnt have any plugins on it.

Ah.  I think there might be a sort of 'seperate' type library website of theirs that does have a bunch of (both free and beta version) plugins available, but I'm not 100% sure.

[Nuke]

im gonna go hit up truespace's offitial plugin list, i remember seeing at least one fir generator there. although its probibly a comercial plugin.

[Lukeskywalkie]

I was actually suprised that everyone didn't adopt inferno's explosions. they were low rez, but the look was pretty awesome in a gravity-free-explosion kinda way.

[Nuke]

using somone elses explosions doesnt seem to be a very creative way to do things.

i was thinking about a way to render them in photoshop by moving layers around. create a bunch of little shapes, debrits chunks, smoke clouds, fire clouds. each sprite on a different layer. you can manipulate each one make them larger, rotate them abit, move them away from the center. do all that while recording an action, and run it over and over again untill you got an explosion animation. has anyone used that aproach before?

[Grug]

using somone elses explosions doesnt seem to be a very creative way to do things.

i was thinking about a way to render them in photoshop by moving layers around. create a bunch of little shapes, debrits chunks, smoke clouds, fire clouds. each sprite on a different layer. you can manipulate each one make them larger, rotate them abit, move them away from the center. do all that while recording an action, and run it over and over again untill you got an explosion animation. has anyone used that aproach before?

Aye.
It is difficult to get it to work properly and make it look good though. Especially if you use the same pattern. When animated it just comes out looking like a spining whirl of colours.
You can just look at it and tell that it is drawn by hand. It's too ordered and not chaotic enough.

That said it is possible to do if you spend of time on it and do it piece by piece.
The longer the animation however, the time you spend on it will incrementaly increase and much more difficult to make look better.

I think editing an explosion or having of reference points would make it easier... but yeah.

Again, if you find an easier technique please let me know.

[aldo_14]

I was actually suprised that everyone didn't adopt inferno's explosions.

Where's the fun in that?

[Carl]

used re-colored explosions from artbeats, IIRC. if you can find hi-res versions of those, it would be a pretty simple matter of recoloring them by exporting them from premiere as a .flm and opening and recoloring it in photoshop.

[Nuke]

i aquired this rather expensive plug in for max called afterburn. i managed to make a rather cheap looking explosion so far. there ate literally hundreds of paramaters and im still trying to figure it all out. i only did one tutorial so far and that was enought to figure out how to render them, however my results were rather cheap. but im stil trying to get the hang of it.

[vaang]

for afterburn tutorials visit allan mckays website www.allanmckay.com under the older tutorial are some afterburn and pflow resources
 

[Nuke]

well i succeded in making one explosion eff. i still got a couple more explosions to do with it, the other anis are non-explosions and i can do those in photoshop.

[Taristin]

well i succeded in making one explosion eff. i still got a couple more explosions to do with it, the other anis are non-explosions and i can do those in photoshop.

Hmm. I recently acquired combustion 4.... and have made a few explosion eff's. Some look really good, too. >..> Gonna see if MT wants them first... though.

[Nuke]

the license on my copy of max ran out, so i updated to version 8, unfortunately i cant get afterburn to work in that version. however i did find a freebe particle based fire plugin and made some effects with that instead. they lack detail over the afterburn one i did but theyre still pretty good.