here's a way to generate an explosion effect in bryce. or particle explosion or whatever I don't know i just thought it looked cool =). You will need Bryce + photoshop or another image editing piece of software. Anyway, here's how I did it. A, create a few different particles in wings, I used wings because I can export extremely low poly count models. I made 5 varying in complexity but all based around a few extruded surfaces. No smoothing or anything. Import them into bryce and arange them into a partially filled in square (IE like a picture frame) randomly using each poly model (this is just the easiest way you can arrange them however you want. This step is easiest done from the above view. group the objects. Then multireplicate a move down + a 90 degree rotation of the objects. do this until you have enough of a cube available. Then just fil in the empty spaces as you wish. Ungroup all of the objects in each layer and start doing the select + randomize + move in the direction opposite of the explosion location. Once you have them randomized to your liking with the size + position + rotate or just pos+rotate, then you can begin the step for motion blurring. Keyframe this on frame 0, You will need to keyframe the explosion WAY down the timeline. Move the particles that will be moving the fastest the most, then move the others + a little randomization as well. Don't move all of the particles if you want some to still be visible, notice that I didn't move all particles in my scene. create a keyframe and preview the animation, you should see the particles moving, if not it's not keyframed properly. render 5-10 frames of this animation with your choice of lighting, I chose a few different colored lights + a black background + no sun fog or haze. After you have the five frames rendered, you should see a slight variation in the position of the particles. if you are satisfied with how much they move in each frame, move to the next step. Render an object mask render of the frames you just rendered, this should be fairly quick. Now, take it all to photoshop. Use the alpha maps to cut out each explosion render, it's really easy with the magic wand tool. make sure you saved them as bitmaps so there's no errors in color then just set it to 1 and go crazy =). It should only take one click per frame. use this selection and flip to your "image" layer instead of the object mask layer and hit ctrl+X to cut it. Then paste it ontop of your first image. Do this for all renders Except the first in that order. Once you paste them all you should have a rather messy looking explosion, but you can probably tell how we will be doing the rest =). You can also do this in the reverse order (frames from the last to the first layered front to back) for a different effect. Next comes the actual motion blurring. Decrease the opacity of each layer as you approach the last image. IE make the first one 75% opaque, next 65, 55, 45,35, 25, ,15 etc. also apply a slight gaussian blur to each layer. Maybe a blur of .4 to the first, .7 to the second increasing up to say.. 2.0. After you have done this you will see pretty much what I have above. The whole process only really took me about 12 minutes in photoshop. then you can play with rendered lights and other effects like the fire I added in the image above. It's something cool to mess with and gives a pretty neat effect. Sorry if this is hard to understand, I just wrote it up quickly so that you could try it for yourselves =). I've used this motion blurring effect in some of my other renders as well.

Here's just the explosion with the postworked blur and no other tweaks. You can see what % is just some quick photoshopping after the blur effect is finished. (done after a "flattening")

On a second thought, my original renders were 2048 * 1536 so a 2.0 gaussian blur has much less of an effect than at lower resolutions, keep this in mind.

Cool beans, too bad I'm not into animations, Bryce is slooooow, ya know ! :P

It's not really an animation per-se, and the whole bryce part probably took about.. 15 minutes total. without render times.

@Kemal- Render to disk overnight. When you need on the computer, stop and save the render where it is at, then continue before you go to bed again. If you render to bitmap sequence instead of avi, then you can always break it in between and continue later. Cool MINI TUT Thanks for the explosion Ornlu!!

Noted it,
Tried it,
Loved it,
Saved it................

Thanks much,
markostimpy.......................

And I think Ornlu has a render farm. :^)