Not sure how soon I’ll come back to this, but happy with the fireball part. The smoke trails need to fade a lot more and be reworked in general, I’d also like to get debris flying out on the ends of the trails, but that might be getting into the realm of a python expression or two. Still getting the hang of particles in general so it might be simpler.
Bounce Tumble and Splash - recommended!
There are two particle systems, both with display mode set to ‘object,’ which is a sphere with some displacement, (one sphere per particle system). The main Psys is the firey explosion, with a high random size variation of the particles and mass dependant on their size. There is then a fairly high (air) Drag setting so the large fireball parts stay in the centre and the smaller parts shoot out.
The second system is a ‘Reactor’ not an emitter and is used for the trails. There is a sphere “blend” material mapped to a large blob shaped object the size of the ‘fire’ which is used as the blending amount between a fire material node and a smoke material node. That is what makes having fire on the end of the ‘trails’ a little interesting. Not out of ideas yet though. I will probably split it into three particle systems. One main one with large, high mass particles for the ball, a second one with low mass, fast, small particles for the fire chunks shooting out and a third reactor particle system attached to the second for the smoke trails.
I’d post the .blend as it would be simpler to look rather than understand my ramble, but I figure I may as well push it a little further first.
PurpleMint - Given that the corn basically ‘explodes’ into popcorn from the amount of heat, I guess they are very alike in general. Much better than the thought of it looking like burnt cauliflower, which was my first thought.
poke - there is still more I want to do to tweak stuff, I figure I may as well improve it first then share the .blend, means I can get my head around what I’m doing better and explain better too.
blenderman345 - true, if I play it in quicktime with the fast forward down it looks much better.
zymn - cheers. My mate describes that movie as not being colourful, but COLOURFUL! Yells it every time…
yeah, adding gravity to the spike… things… would make it look better. and maybe have them fade and get smaller a little as they get longer. try finding actual videos of explosions. i think that would help alot… but, i still like it even now. geez, i wanna eat that explosion.
-Gravity, as already mentioned.
-Perhaps fewer “trails”, or at least vary them in size.
-Speed the whole thing up a bit, it looks sort of slow-motion.
-How does it finish? Is there an end to this explosion or would it require a cut to another scene?
Very good so far.
EDIT: By the way, I would indeed love to examine this blend. I never would have thought of doing trails via changing the air resistance. It’s all part of the same system this way… brilliant.
I did genuinely intend to come back to this method and write a tutorial when I was happier with it. Got a specific request for the .blend recently so I figured I may as well upload the file as is.
