Attached Link: http://server3006.freeyellow.com/3908/stats/blastfinal.mpg

Hi all any one here ever use the 3D disperse tool in bryce4 it can make for great expolsions Mocap ( 1.2MB Mpeg)

Holy $#!* Mocap! I can see where you used the disperse tool but how the heck did you get the wonderful fireball effect on the explosions? OK, fess up, what else are ya using??? Great job, well worth the time it took to download!

The explosion looks great. I wish that could be done in Bryce with volume objects but simply flat out can't! :(

The explosions look like composites from Illusion if I'm not mistaken. If not then they're Reel Explosions , either way they must be mattes.

You are all basically correct ,The actual explosions are footage from my "Reel Explosions" CD that were composited in Adobe after effects usng the "BlackMatte" Plugin. the sound was downloaded FREE from the apple web site the electric arch effect was done using "strata mediapaint" an awesome post effects program that I got FREE from the cover CD of some film effects Magazine with the final editing done in adobe premeire 5.1 I have a huge collection of 3D models that I use in Bryce Lightwave6.5 and Cinema 4dlx6 this model (shown here) has over 100 parts and will be featured prominently in my 3D animated scifi short film where all of my exterior space battle scenes will be done in BRYCE 4 . thank for all the comments Mocap

I tried just about everything to use volume object for animation. At the moment they work great as, well, cloud objects that stand apart. Any boolean operation will render badly. A real downner is also that you can use only the basic Bryce primitives: ball, rectange etc. with volume objects. If you use an imported object volumes just won't render correctly. This all applies to animation. In single picture you can probably make work arounds. What I'd like to know are these fixed in up-coming Bryce 5 do I have to switch

Joke wrote" "A real downner is also that you can use only the basic Bryce primitives: ball, rectange etc. with volume objects. If you use an imported object volumes just won't render correctly." Joke you should try "Amorphium" from play Inc.($50 US) you can create awsome organic shapesand export as wavefront obj for use in bryce like this one

then you can import it into bryce like below

apply a fire volume material to it and place it inside your imported object group or bryce Group object and ungroup and set the the dispers command to 3d disperse

in the time line begin dispersing your group while also expanding the size of the the fireball within it

as the peices disperse and fly out of the shot remember to go into the materials Lab and gradually increase the transparency of the fire over the course of the explosion so it appears to dissipate naturally. this is the tecnique i used in the past before i got my reel explosions footage

Phat video man.. Is that a plug in or what?? -Chris

I'm afraid your solution does not work. Volumes look real ugly and many underlying problems exist: no boolean etc. (but read on!). Try using a ball and a fire volume. Then try an imported ball and apply same volume material. Very different and positively ugly. I've been trying to find a way to do a Brycean explosion. For this I need expanding gases and fire. Volume objects offer a nice looking way to do those. But there's a problem: You can't put two volume object together and booleans don't work. All you get are ugly render errors. I tried every angle I could think off. I even tried to model a sequence of meshes for the explosion. But then I found that Volume material can be applied to only bryce primitives (where they don't work correctly). BUT!! Today I tried ROCKS!! And lo and behold Volumes work there beautifully. Boolean operation work also!! You can stretch, punch a hole with a negative, do fire with black smoke etc.. There's only a small drawback that you cannot edit rocks but at least now I have a building block for volumes that work. Fellow brycers: test it and report what you got.

Mocap - Ive never seen Amorphium in action....that's one sexy UI. Shells out money

I used clays fire mat....looks really good.

Mocap: Can you email me the shape you formed in Amorphium. I have just the demo and I created the same object but could not test 'cause save is not possible with demo. I tried other imported objects but bryce but volumes just render incorrectly - as if they were volumes turned into solids. Put Clay's fire mat and make it a volume. That produces a strange tv noise type of render - totally wrong. Any way teh rock/stone method appears to work. I notice you have Lightwave. What are the pros and cons compared to Bryce?

Yes, but I will need an email address to send you an attachment the .obj file is 613k I hope thats ok with your email server. send it to me privately at: mark@customedia.net as to lightwave its a very complex and powerful modeling/animation and film effects program with a steep learning curve as you well know. it retails for $2495 + shipping so compared to bryce its VERY !!pricy I love bryce because of the minimal setup time required before one can actually produce something. My little impromptu tutorial earlier in this thread took all of 12 minutes to create in bryce bryce is so underrated by my snobish friends in the lightwave community but i still use it along with lightwave. and I can actually export bryce terrains as lightwave objects WITH textures and use them instantly in lightwave while my snob friends are struggling to create realistic mountain ranges in the LW modeler I love lightwave and will useit for character stuff eventually but i will always use bryce. Mocap

One more nice feature in amorphium - you can increase or decrease polygon count on imported models with it, and even increase and decrease polygon count selectively on different parts of a model. There are other programs that do this, but they probably cost more than amorphium's $50. Very nice if you want to use some of your complicated models for background without eating your memory

Mocap - great Amorphium tutorial. Thanks!