explode

Ive searched for this as it seems to be a simple question but I cant find it as a thread so Im afraid I’ll have to ask

Whats the best way of making an explosion. Nothing special just something to go between hitting an object and ending that object…

Is it an animated plane set to bilboard or an animated sequence of meshes…?
Any and all suggestions welcome…

Depends on your own artistic take on it, what do YOU want it to be?

Generally, it’ll be a UV animated halo plane with some IPO scaling or something, and probably some ADD fire plane in front of that for a glow.

BUT, it depends on you, what do you want it to look like?

uv animated halo plane

I really dont know what that is - I know what a uv mapped plane is but dont know how to animate it. Is it really as easy as adding a gif to a plane? not sure about the halo thing

Nope, gifs don’t work. BGE is a lot more…um…simple than that, you have to hand-program in everything.

Search for Animated Texture, or Animated UV, its pretty easy and a lot of people show tuts how to do it.

I’ve tried the uv animated map and it crashes my home pc and doesnt work on my work pc (may be a video error at work but cant update the driver…)
Are there any tips on creating a mesh explosion. The other thought I had was creating several planes with the different explosion uv’d and do a series of new object end objects linked to a property count. not sure what effect this would have on the speed if there were a lot of explosions…

Firstly, use Halo instead of Billboard (it always faces the camera on every axis). Nextly, I’d say to end the object immediately , add some fire-looking planes (halos) moving in different directions with short life-spans. Add some smoke-looking planes with a longer life span moving up. Use IPOs to make the smoke get larger and fade out. You could also add some dynamic debris objects. Now for the K.O., do Akula’s animated UV thing to make the smoke billow, and swirl, and cause lung cancer, and have a flashy orange lamp jump to the position of the explosion. But don’t try to add a lamp… you will fail.

hmm… halo doesn’t work on my comp (any settings i’m missing? i just push the halo button :D) i’ma look into this.

yes theres a lot to the halo, usually you have to go into Edit mode, and to Rotate Y, by 90 degrees.

try playing your game and viewing the halo in wireframe mode, you’ll probably see that your halo is sidewaise…

no matter what I do, halo appears as an angled plain, Ive cleared rotation, Ive rotated as object and as mesh…

halo rotates the poly to face the camera, regardless of where the camera is. you have to make sure the plane is facing along the x-axis (and remember, one side is see through, so make sure the normals are facing the right direction. I don’t remember which way that is tho… basically, if it’s along the y-axis and you can’t see it, rotate 180 degrees or flip normals.)

[edit] I said Y axis, and meant X. my bad.

The normals should be facing the negative x-axis. Also, be sure to use an actual camera, it sometimes rotates oddly when viewed without a camera.

I think they rotate to face the camera, regardless of whether you’re looking through it.
also, I corrected the axis in my previous post…