Shown here is my latest iteration on a semi-sentient cruise missile. It will, eventually, tangle with one of my tanks. I had hoped that with a 2.6Ghz [762n] Pavilion, half gig of RAM, and having just upgraded to a 128Mb graphics card, I could get a blurred, whirling propeller disc. Not so. I could use some advice. Any tutorials out there?

Also, I'm starting to play with 'SHATTER' and 'PARTICLES' to make things fly apart. Any suggestions on simulating an exploding fireball?

On the fireball, I had some progress with metaball objects with hand-painted orange/yellow shaders; nested several of them with various degrees of transparency. Look forward to seeing what you find as you try various ideas.

A couple of suggestions: 1) Most of the fragmenting modifiers tend to give rather ordered results, but you can make things a bit more interesting and chaotic by applying two or more modifiers to the same object and some clever keyframing. 2) Stick a bulb in the middle of your exploding object and use the light sphere (on the bulb's effects tab). You can keyframe this to get a nice explosion effect, and also keyframe the light's colour so it falls off over time from white heat through yellow and orange to red. There are several other light effects on the same tab that you might find useful. Hope that helps!

Oh, and judicious use of the lens flare effects helps as well, though be aware that Carrara's lens flares are treated (correctly) as camera artifacts and will therefore overlay your entire image (they won't, for example, silhouette other objects). Now THAT would be a very funky addition to C5 (as would the ability to make particles act as lights for this purpose) - you still listening Charles?

Thanks for the tips. It looks like nested objects are the way to go. Here's my attempts as of last night. The animation is 6 sec.long [at 24 fps]. The first eight pics shown here happen in the first 18 frames. Then there's a long [comparatively] cooling off period while everything falls to the ground. I'm using [basically] the 'EXPLODE' modifier. There's some FOG and FIRE in there as an experiment toward the end. The explosion uses four nested spheres. The first, which you see in Pic.#1, shatters into tiny pieces, then a second that breaks into largeish pieces, and a third to which I applied the 'STRANGE' shader, plus a hefty dollop of 'GLOW' and 'TRANSPARENCY' Then there's a fourth [a vertex obj.] with the same texture map as the outside one. This one I took into the Vertex Modeler and punched out a few polygons, added some thickness, grabbed some vertices around the open hole and deformed them outward.

In the opening six frames, I flashed the scene with a spotlight quite close to, and above, the sphere. Then there's a bulb light inside. That flashes the scene again as the pieces move farther away, and this light got color added in three frames: yellow, then red.

The FOG modifier gave both good results, and poor. What you see here was the best: vaporous, and swirls like cigarette smoke. In between these frames the modifier likes to go off on its own. In those frames it often looks like a jet of nasal spray, but largeish, like a cloud of buckshot. If I use it again, I will closely check the effects every few frames before doing a final render that I expect to show to anyone.

This was a satisfying excercise, though not what I started out to build. This is a good sci-fi effect, but does not look 'real'. I'll try to put some of your advice to work, and see you back here.

Now...about those pesky propeller discs?

Very interesting. 1.) There's an explosion tutorial here in the back room. 2.) You can make particles be lights by applying anything grows to it.

Here's a simple example of what can be done with the explosion tutorial. -Kix

Sorry, that post two threads ago should have said anything glows. -Kix

Thanks Kix. I'll add that to the mix and try it out tonight.

A quick after-thought: could a real-life explosion be rotoscoped to a sphere [or a closely clustered group of non-grouped spheres] or a metaball? Or...can this only be done onto a flat surface?

It could be applied to the surface of a sphere... I'm not sure how well it would do what you want. Try it and let us know! :D

THat's good to know. Thanks. The trick now is to find a digital clip of an explosion. What might I need to do a capture from a DVD? Any suggestions?

Actually...there are companies that provide royalty-free clips of explosions and flames, many of them on black matt. I've seen free samples from them, too....unfortunately I've lost the link. This sort of thing.... http://www.nccinema.ch/eprod.html

'Checked this one out. Looks promising. At least for someone with his training wheels still on. Thanks!

If you're thinking of rotoscoping a 2D image, then I can heartily recommend ParticleIllusion from Wondertouch - it's a brilliant way of simulating 3D particle effects using 2D sprite images. Not sure what demos/special editions are available at the moment, but I believe they've got a Max OSX SE out... www.wondertouch.com

anyway you can post the animation(s) I'd love to view them :)

Attached Link: http://www.dexfx.com/Effects.htm

This is a sample expolosion from Particle Illusion which Hotsteppa mentioned above. It's an amazing piece of software.

For this shot (these are four stills from an animation), I used Particle Illusion for the explosion, Carrara for the flying saucer and some debris, and Adobe AfterEffects to do the compositing and to create some of the debris of the mission tower collapsing.

If you want to see the whole animation (it's actually not the most recent version, but I haven't posted anything to my site for a while), check out this link:
http://www.dexfx.com/Effects.htm

Hope that's helpful.

• Dex

Oho. I know that building. Was in the City just yesterday -- thought about you when a Muni train passed me.