Blowing stuff up: The explosion C&C

[InCreator]

Does anyone know a good tutorial or way to animate an explosion?

Out of 7 or 8 tries, I ended up with this-




And I'm not happy with this at all :'(

I want my explosion realistic, not transclusent and not anti-aliased on edges.
What should I do (using real life animation/grab from movie etc is out of question)?

[Darth Mandarb]

I don't think your attempt(s) were horrible!  They just lack a "fluidity" that I like to see in explosions.  I have come across some amazing explosions over at pixel joint.  Here are some examples:





That's just a few ... but might provide some inspiration!

Good luck!

[poc301]

A quick tip:

Instead of the explosion playing backwards after its big frame, make it dissipate outward instead of imploding upon itself.  It will look more natural that way.


EDIT : BAH!  beaten by the Mandarb.  See how those dissipate?  That is what I meant.


-Bill

[Atelier]

Depending on the fuel, of course, you should add some debris and also licks of flames not attached to the main explosion. I would make the edges more jagged too, by using the chisel point on the pen. Or something. Plus if the animation will be used lots, smoke would be good too so it doesn't become boring after the fifth time it's played.

Hope this helps.

[InCreator]

Thanks for quick & helpful response!

I said "realistic" so "masochistic" approach of pixeldrawing everything won't help here, especially since I plan to use explosions with 2D sprites of 3D models (which I model because I suck at animating them in 2D), and I need about 10 different explosions!... but those moving pictures really helped --

-- because I think that movement of flame & smoke elements and dissipating was that I missed so far.

I decided to go for still using alpha channel, so 256-color GIF looks quite stupid here with jerky edges and all, but everything will appear soft and transclusent near edges in-game.

Flying debris, smoking and burning stuff will be particles apart from animation, since I plan to put some physics into it.

So, after billion (yes, billion) mouse clicks, I ended up here...





Some touch-ups are still needed yet. Or did I miss something?

[MrColossal]

Just passing this on:

http://www.positech.co.uk/content/explosion/explosiongenerator.html

Explosion Generator, I've used it a few times and it makes some neat results for a quick explosion.

I recommend bringing the exported bitmap into photoshop, copying it into it's own alpha channel and playing with the levels to alias the edges. If you want I can make a small tutorial showing how to do this.

This is what I ended up with



One could even make a photoshop action to take lots of these bitmaps and do this all automatically so you'd have a series of explosions to choose from so it wasn't always the same explosion over and over again.

[InCreator]

Generator looks awesome!
But it's... kinda cheap.
Also, it looks to be limited to 64x64 16-frame animations?

I will never make as cool explosions as generator does, but I think I still make them myself
And if all fails, I'll make my own generator

[tzachs]

I've once followed an xna tutorial, and they had a section there for creating an explosion via a particle engine. The results looked awesome!  :o

You can find the first part of the explosion tutorial here, and continue to the next two sections to see the rest.

The tutorial is made for xna, but I'm pretty sure you can apply it to ags as well, since all the formulas are right there...

[Chicky]

Your new explosion looks great InC, stick with doing it that way.

[Revan]

What 3D program are you using to create / animate the 3D models?

If it's something like 3D studio max, why not make the explosions on that (using particles) then just reduce it to the key frames... Hope this helps...

http://www.3dm3.com/tutorials/explore2/

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

The first thing I'd say is that you're using way too many colors and blending with your explosion, it drastically reduces the impact of the animation visually with all the colors toned down and blended.  Also, at least initially in the explosion you want oranges and yellows rather than grays, which gradually reduce down the spectrum to red and then gray.  Right now it's like you've got a small explosion inside of a smokescreen because the smoke is appearing before the actual explosion does, if you understand me.  I made a quick edit of your explosion to introduce more flames and to make some of the debris brighter.  Bear in mind that I think the best way to go would be to start with a nice bright explosion and work towards smoke rather than include it to start with!

1.  Removed a frame that made the action pause and inserted a frame to show some of the debris falling.
2.  Added more yellow and orange to the explosion, particularly with the debris spikes.
3.  Reduced the animation to 64 colors/frame.  This helps reduce the muddy look of the animation somewhat.



I'd like to see you take another crack at this without starting from grey.  I think the result would be much much better.  If it helps you could always include the object that is blowing up in the background.

[Pinback]

Just thought I'd throw in some explosions I did recently.





Personally I found that studying a real explosion (Youtube vids) makes it much easier to animate them.
While all the dynamic movement can be tricky, it's not that hard to get the hang of it if you meticulously study how a real explosion works.

Heres a good one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHuOb3_WbfI

Good first attempt though, InCreator. A few more frames for the smoke dissipation would be good (This bit should be easier since you can just erase the smoke bit by bit), also the fiery frame you have (Frame 4) should be brighter and rounder with almost no smoke, and a little more orange all round the fire.

Like this frame from my link:

[InCreator]

I like it!
How exactly did you do smoke puffs rolling-out-from-center thing? This thing I like most.

I mean, what was technique in this?