Quick Tip: the Secret to Making Convincing Explosions with FumeFX

This entry is part 9 of 14 in the Evan Schaible Session
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In this Quick Tip we will examine a few overlooked methods to optimize explosions made with FumeFX. Not noise parameters or other obvious things, but something that many don’t think about until they are told, and than they say “Oh yeah! That make perfect sense!!”. Not sensational…but quite handy if creating a realistically behaving explosion is what you’re after.

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Discussion 14 Comments

  1. BboyKoma says:

    I animate the time scale from higher to lower value and get similar effect.It’s good to animate X turbulence and and direction too if you’re makeing realistic explosions.. ;)

  2. Fabian says:

    Animating the timescale is not a great idea, you will lose detail if you do it.
    Same with velocity damping, you should never animate it unless you want to do something like low detail fog. The key to a good exlosion is the heat production and a high timescale.
    BTW Evan: low iterations and low quality work better for explosions than a quality of 10. ;)

  3. Johnny says:

    Mountain? this tuto is ridicilious

  4. MovieMaker says:

    Quick question, does FumeFX come with 3DSM or is it a plugin?

  5. pablo gillano says:

    ok, actually a large explosion isnt slower than a small one as mentioned in the tutorial, it will be physically faster than a small one due to there being more fuel and higher temperatures, thus being larger. the reason they may appear to be slower is purely one of perspective/parallax, ie they are being viewed from very far away, so in camera space they move less pixels per frame. If you work to real world equivalent units and camera lenses, you stand a much better chance of nailing the scale, just because its easier to work out how far the explosion should travel in a certain time, then set your turbulence/timescale and other settings accordingly. I agree to not cheat by animating these sort of settings, but should animate the real world settings which would affect the explosion, ie fuel/temperature, etc.

    animating the damping, is like forcing the density of the air to increase. this is not what happens in reality. what does happen is the initial fuel and temperature is massive for a short while.

  6. bez says:

    thank you you helped me allot
    and it looks great.

  7. Mickey says:

    I wasn’t at all impressed with this tutorial. I have seen so many other explosion that look way better and more realistic than this explosion done in fumefx. It didn’t even look real. It looked like a cheap one out of particle illusion.

    • Jeremy says:

      I have no affiliation the CGtuts, or Envato whatsoever. BUT, what I WILL do, is refund every penny you paid for this tutorial, out of my own pocket.

  8. None says:

    My god. Maybe the worst tutorial I’ve ever seen. You got a lot of nerve posting such crap, not even building it from scratch. Calling yourself an artist. Probably it was your crowning achievement with FFx. You really cannot see that it’s bad? Examples? Animation, the look of the simulation and my God the render(you call that lightning the scene?) Before you post tutorials meybe you should watch some yourself. Sorry for the harsh words, but really…

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