Hi! I need a program that generates decent explosions... Any sugestions? //Peter - Cheers!

Write a particle engine

Try Quake III ..

generates nice explosions

Adobe Aftereffects

or do them by hand in photoshop

I think he''s looking for some routine that can generate fractal explosions. Of course whether or not he''s looking for 3d or 2d I don''t know.

Personally I could use a good 2d explosion generator myself, but I don''t know of any off-hand. So I have two suggestions bundled into 1.

Use 3d Max to create a particle explosion and render every 5th (or so) frame of the explosion. Those can be saved as JPEG files. Then store them and use them for your explosion sprites. There, that will solve both 3d and 2d.

There are plug-ins for Max that make it much easier to do explosions and flames. But I think you get more control over them if you setup your own particle system.

The drawback is that not everyone owns or can use 3d Max.

Charles Galyon

Have Photoshop? Here's a simple method:

1 - Make new square image. 512x512 recommended.
2 - Select a bright yellow color for and a darker red color. Try FFF600 and D60000
3 - Make a circular selection in the middle of your image
4 - Feather your selection by 30 pixels or so
5 - Generate clouds
6 - With large dodge tool (200 or so) make the middle brighter.
7 - Deselect
8 - Polar to rectangular
9 - Rotate 90 degrees CW
10- Blast from left
11- Wind from the left a couple of times
12- Rotate 90 degrees CCW
13- Rectangular to Polar

I know it looks long. Try it, though, and you'll see what I'm doing. You can then adapt the technique to suit your purposes.

Edited by - TerranFury on December 22, 2001 6:11:02 PM

3ds max also has a simple explosion tool in the rendering tab.. rendering->environment to be precise.. you have to select a gizmo, and render the perspective view.. it will also do a bunch of frames and save it as jpegs or avi..

Check out Blender too. Download it then check the user tutorials. Among other things are tutorials on generating cool explosions (ala Death Star in Star Wars IV enhanced version) with a shock wave shooting outward. Also found a nice deflector shield tutorial. Its free so it couldnt hurt.

I''m sorry for this Necro... It''s just that I saw this technique searching for a way to do explosions, and have tried it out and found it to be extermely helpful. So I want to say Thanks to TerranFury if he is still lurking around.

Oh, and if you add more circles to make the first circle selection rather irregular before you feather it, you can also get some cool irregular explosions.

-=Lohrno

You can also use a modification of TerranFury''s technique to make pretty good looking shockwave rings.

Basically, you just create a horizontal bar instead of a circular object, and then after rotating it CW use wind and a little motion blur to streak it out. Do rectangular-to-polar, and boom, it''s a shockwave.

The Polar Coords plugin is great for this kind of stuff!

Of course, if you have a 3d program that can do volumetric surfaces (Lightwave''s HyperVoxels, for example), it''s a snap to generate realistic smoke/fire effects.

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