Use the Explosive Fern freebie mat. created by Joerg Weber and available at Renderosity.

1. Instead of applying this mat. file to the fern plant, create a sphere made up of about 30 or so fir trees, with the bases of the trunks meeting at the center of the sphere.

2. Next, go to display materials, and change the trunk and leaf materials to the explosive fern mat.

3. Group these trees, and call the group trees.

4. Now create a point light, placing it at the center of the trees group, giving it the following settings:

Set the color as orange.
The Softness as 0.10
The Power at 150

5. Go to the Lens Flare Editor, and change the following settings:

Set overall Intensity at 100%
Click off the Ring setting
Under Random Streaks set:
Intensity to 80%
Amount to 400
Sharpness 100%

6. Go back to layers, and select both the trees group and the point light, and group
   them, calling this new group My Explosion 1.

7. Save this group as an object in your object folders for later use.

Don't try to render this in a full scene, since it will take too long to render, instead...

Go to the tutorial I placed in this forum on clipping alpha planes in Volumetric atmospheres, and use it to create and alpha plane of your explosion, rather than a tree. You may have to play with the mat editor settings some.

http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12368&Form.ShowMessage=1824345

Add a new point light to the center of the plane, and adjust the lens flare. Save this as a prop, and there you go.

Message edited on: 06/30/2004 15:35