I am sorry to bother you once again but I have tried to make an explosion with Carra but there was no light , only the object blew away in pieces when it was animated,is it impossible to create an explosion in carrara like say a car blown apart? if the answer is yes can somebody please give me a little tip or refer me to a good tutorial on modifiers and particles

Hi again grafikdon, One of the members here, AzChip, had a great tutorial about this. Az, I couldn't access your tutorial anymore. Do you still have it laying around? Mark

Try different solution like light sphere inside , masks on lights, duplicate and overlap the same objects with different modifiers parameters, 3d aura on exploded object. There are many ways to make an explosion. I think one of the best method to learn is the experimentation (with fun). I hope my advice and my basic example (5 minutes of work) are helpful. Toxe

Unfortunately, I don't have the tutorial laying around. But here it is in a nutshell --

You want an object to be your flame cloud -- I create something blobby in the metaballs modeler (although the explosion above was made from a simple sphere primitive). Then I apply the atomize deformer to the flame object -- settings of particle density 9.99, size of particles, 3.0 or so. Open this object in the vertex modeler with apply deformers on object ticked. Subdivide the thing (to make the outer edges round instead of faceted) and jump out of the vertex modeler. Duplicate the object and rotate it a tiny bit to get a bit of double bumping going on in the cloud shape. Apply a shader that has yellow and orange in the glow channels. Rotate the two cloud objects independently of each other to get some undulation going on, and scale the entire cloud down to very small, increasing the scale as the animation procedes. Add a particle fountain with no gravity and a and a maximum angle from up set at 180. Particle size should be small. The final touch is to use the aura filter.

Obviously, you'll want to play with the settings to your own taste.... The cool thing about the cloud object being a "real" 3D object is that as it expands it can consume the object that's blowing up.

I hope this helps!

• Dex

wondering if you guys can send me the carrara file containing those settings???

Mine's an RDS file; if it'll do you any good, I'd be happy to send one to you. (I'll have to build it again, but that's no problem.) Let me know. - Dex

I know I am new to 3d and Carrera but here is a suggestion that you may want to try, in addition to the excellent ideas listed above. My idea requires a little more manual effort, but I am thinking that big items don't just dissolve when they explode. To create the exploding car, or anything for that matter, you could break the task into 2 parts, the car itself and the special effects. First, you could model the car with all of the parts kept as individual pieces, ie doors, windows and so on. Then you would figure out how the pieces should blow apart, such as from front to back, from the center, up and over, etc. I then suggest using a combination of moving and rotating the pieces around and using bend, bulge and twist deformers over time, especially for larger heavier parts. Use a similar technique for the smaller pieces but also use the atomize and explode deformers over time and have these move a little faster than the larger pieces, especially as they move outward. Do this until you have animated the pieces of the car blowing apart to your satisfaction. Then add the special effects listed above as the actual fireball, and maybe some more flashes of light and smoke(fog) and wa-la... Ka-Boooom! Something worthy of the movies! I haven't actually done this yet, but your post has peaked my interest so I will certainly try it! However, I hope this "sparks" your imagination. .Painter

Thanks guys for all your contributions. I am trying all I can to see what i can get but heck,how am I supposed to do this when my carrarra paralyses my system each time i try to render? I mean I set the render on the gourad or flat mode but it still crashes,a bug huh? Carrara is my first 3D software ever and look at where it has landed me(Lunatic assylum) I mean it drives me nuts to see my system crash each time I try to render. I read the help files and some tutorial thoroughly so I know what I am doing. Do I quit using Carrara or what?

Grapfikdon, Crashing on render is not common but it is fixable. Repost your crashing question in a new thread. There are people in the forum that have had that exact problem and were able to fix it after a few simple steps. Make sure to list your platform, system, video drivers and any accelerators you have installed. Also, connect with the tech folks at Eovia. They are supposed to be pretty good about helping out. Mark

Sorry to hear about your render problems.... I to have had problems with rendering in the assemble room. Funny thing, carrera gave me a couple "unknown error has occurred" messages while working on this piece and I had to restart the program. However, my system did not crash. For this experiment, I actually turned off all settings (lights, bump, etc) to do test renders of the full animation until it looked right. This mainly was to improve the render speed. The finished product was rendered with all options turned on in the renderer and saved as an animated gif. It was a quick test so I did not try to make everything look "perfect". (Note: The car model came with Carrera.) .Painter

We had a challenge here on this forum to blow up a planet. I basically used AZChips tutorial and posted it here. You can go and look at it back in the postings. -Kix

I went and looked through the postings and it's WAY back there. It't titled The Day the Plane Came (500K) (Annihlation Challenge) and it's about 30 postings from the end. Hey Litst, how long do these things last? I haven't been involved in this forum THAT long have I? -Kix

When you click on the "archive" button, you'll get access to all the messages that have been posted since the beginning of the forum, Kix . 2211 topics so far :) First message by JeffH, on 10/4/1999 .