This tutorial of sorts was in respone to Kixum's comment on how I achieved the effects on my 'Risky Overtake' image. I'm not going too much into building the scene and such; just simply how I created all the effects. The apps I've used to create this image is Ray Dream Studio 5.0.4 and Photoshop 4. I'm guessing that most everyone who reads this arleady has a good knowledge of using RDS/Carrara and Photoshop.

I started off by duplicating the body of the vehicle as this will serve as the chunks of debris that fly off in the explosion. I wanted to make the effect towards the rear of the vehicle where the engine sits so after creating a duplicate model I jumped in the mesh form modeler (or vertex modeler for Carrara users), selecting Create New Master in the window prompt, and deleted the vertecies in the front half of the racecraft.

After exiting the Mesh Form/Vertex modeler with the altered duplicate obect still selected I then went into the Browser palette and select Explosion in the Deformers tab. After playing around with the sliders was I able to get my desired effect from the settings as shown in the image above.

Now that I've got all the flying debris in place the next thing to do is to group both the debris and regular body of the vehicle and, apply another explosion deformer effect as outlined by the settings. The minimal group deformation keeps a good resemblence of body while making the craft appear to be on the verge of breaking apart from the explosion as well as spead out the debris more irregularly. Other objects, such as the wings are simply moved around and rotated to give the further apprearance of damage.

The next task is to create the big ball of flames itself through the use of Kixum's Explosion Tutorial . I wanted to make a nice gradiated fire effect so in the Shader Editior I placed Mix operators using two color channels and one Celluar function in both mixing channels above and the Elevation functions in the one below (refer to the image above in case this sounds too complicated) . I done this for both the color channel and glow channel - since I'm using the Aura filter I have to make the colors darker in the glow channel else they'll be far too bright using the filter. Highlight and Shininess values are set to zero.

Then I take the ball of flames and closely have it overlap the rear of the racecraft - around the area where I created all the exploding fragments of the craft. In addition I've placed several gray-colored cloud primitves (not shown in the image) around the big explosion , which probably wasn't necessary, but I figured you can't have fire without smoke :) Now to light up the whole thing. Since I'm working in Ray Dream minus the Anything Glows extension, I have to manually add in a couple of lights for the explosion. I've used only 3 large bulb lights - each with 90% brightness, range of 50 inches and a Distance Fall Off of 100% - these bulbs were placed within the explosion cloud and the cast shadows option is turned off . A sun light from the Four Elements: Wind extension was used to light up the rest of the scene.

With all the our scene in place all that's left to render it . For my post-rendering effects I needed to render two scenes. For the sake of generalzation one rendered scene with the red racer in the foreground we'll call Image 1, and another rendered scene without one the racer we'll call Image 2. In addition went into G-Buffers in the Scene Settings check on the boxes makered Distance and Object Index.

With our rendered images - which each took over 4 hours on my 500Mhz G3 Mac to complete - is it time to open up Photoshop and put these speedsters in the heat of action.

In the Layers Palette I placed Image 1 above Image 2. Next I opened up the Channels palette and selected the Distance channel - using the magic wand tool (using a tolerance of 12) selected the foreground vehicle silhoette. Then gone back into the layers, with the selection still highlighted, to cut the foreground racer from Image 1 and paste it into a new layer. Once that's completed can I finally merge Image 1 into Image 2. Now the red racer won't have any of those 'faded' streaks around it once I apply the blur effects.

Next is to create our good blur effect but I want to maintain some detail around the exploding racecraft. I duplicated two layers out of the newly merged layer; we'll call one Background Layer and the other two Blur Layer 1, and 2. For Blur Layer 1 I went into the Filter menu and selected Radial Blur, selecting Zoom and setting the quality to Best, with the Amount set to 25. I made sure to move the preview cursor closest to where I felt the vanishing point on the image was - whicn in this case was all the way to the left of the image near the big exlosion. I done the same effect for Blur Layer 1 the second duplicated layer with the Amount set to 10 and placed it above Blur Layer 1.

I duplicated Blur Layer 1 which we'll name Blur Layer 3 and placed it on top of, you guessed it, Blur Layer 2. The Layer with the red foreground racer will remain above all the other layers while the Background Layer remains below.

Finally I went back into the Channel Palette and selected the Index channel. Once again I take the magic wand tool and carefully selected the light gray racer silhuoette in the background along with all the other pieces of debris around the it. Then going back into the layers palette, inveresed the selection and created a Quick Mask in Blur Layer 3 and set the layer opacity to 43% - this keeps some of the purple racer details intact. I've done the same thing to Blur Layer 2 but this time the selection includes the explosion along with the racecraft and the Opacity is kept at 100% - this masking preserves the lightly blurred details of the explosion.

After adding few finishing touches such as brightness and color correction, is our little scene now completed.

Sorry for the image overload. I hope this tutorial wasn't too confusing and that it answers any questions any of you might have.

I think this is outstanding and thanks for the post! -Kix

Very cool! I especially appreciate the showing of using the "object index" channel. I didn't know what using that would do or look like. Thanx! :>