Quick Tip: the Secret to Making Convincing Explosions with FumeFX
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.
Final Effect Preview
Video 1
Download
Note: click the ‘Monitor’ icon to view tutorial in full-screen HD.
Don’t miss more CG tutorials and guides, published daily – subscribe to Cgtuts+ by RSS.
Enjoyed this Post?
Subscribe to our RSS Feed, Follow us on Twitter or simply recommend us to friends and colleagues!
By Evan Schaible
Premium Members
Source Files, Bonus Tutorials & More for all relevant Tuts+ sites in one subscription. Join Now
Related Posts
Premium Membership
Source Files, Bonus Tutorials & More for all relevant Tuts+ sites in one subscription
How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer
Use your 3D skills to build a freelance business with this authoritative guide on freelancing written by the authors of the super popular FreelanceSwitch blog.
Shotgun - More
3D Basix
Just getting started? Start with our basix tutorials on the fundamentals. View All Basix Tutorials
Other Plus Sites ...
aetuts+ audiotuts+ vectortuts+ tuts+ phototuts+ cgtuts+ nettuts+ psdtuts+ activetuts+ mobiletuts+Create a Tutorial, Get Paid!
Have something to teach the world? Want to earn money doing it? Tutorials, screencasts, and articles published here on Cgtuts+ are largely contributed by readers just like you! We'll pay you great money for good content. Find Out More
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..
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.
Mountain? this tuto is ridicilious
You’re right! It IS ridicilious!! Although I am admittedly not very familiar with the word “ridicilious”, and therefore just assumed you meant “really good”…
Quick question, does FumeFX come with 3DSM or is it a plugin?
It is a plugin you have to buy seperately, sorry
This is clearly your fault, and it is right of you to apologize!
For Free Smoke Effect you can try the new Blender Alpha 2.5…for example
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-250/smoke-simulation/
http://www.blenderguru.com/introduction-to-smoke-simulation/
So Powerfull!!
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.
In this sort of thing, I cheat wherever I can get away with it, that way my deadlines are met… thought every artist did that…
thank you you helped me allot
and it looks great.