I've looked at a lot of explosion tutorials and though they are good to me they just didn't have that realistic look. With some experimenting in volume materials I came up with this pic. 1. Create a sphere the size of the explosion you wish. 2. Apply a volume cloud material (in this case wispy cloud). 3. Create 3 radial lights and place at the exact center. a. radial 1 color yellow intensity ~100 b. radial 2 color red-dark orange intensity ~100 c. radial 3 color white intensity ~30 Play with the settings until you are satisfied. It can be animated by changing the base density of the material and/or the size of the sphere as well as light intensity. Just add debris, etc. Hope this gives some people some ideas and is useful.

very nice, looks very realistic.

Very Nice good tut. Pleiades

not bad now we just need to come up with a way to make the sparks come shooting out! Lol I will give this a try.

Impressive, and a beautifully concise tutorial.

i love this! i have been trying to do an effect similar for a long time. thanks!

You could try shooting sparks with thin stretched cones, fanning out from centre, texture with very mild rain map and colour red.

Show me Kate, I am experimenting with several differen't things I think Aldaron really caught something here!

I thought I'd put up a pic of the explosion actually used in a scene.

Not bad. I am still playing I will post something when I am done! I do like this though!

Did you use this in your Star Wars pic that you submitted for the contest? If not how'd you get the explosion and sparks?

No that was done before you posted this. I used snow I think I went and saved the image and then forgot to save the file DOH!!! But I am pretty sure it was a snow material I picked up a long time ago and I increased the ambience on it to get it to glow.

Now this was just a quick go at using the stretched cones as sparks....I'd probably group about 10 or so in a fan shape, then replicate that to create shafts of sparks...you would vary the settings to get different hues of red/yellow and density of texture on the cones to make it look more real...if this image is faint that's because it was suppose to show how the colour fades....maybe not he best technique but you might find it helpful....

setting for the sparks

mmmm being a newbie I'm assuming you went DTE Kate and modified Starflowers because mine don't look like yours when I replicate your settings and colors. Did you modify the filter and noise? Thanks Kate! :)

No, I didn't modify the texture in DTE. I have used very stretched cones, and lowered the base density, and used spherical setting but that is all. Not sure why yours would look different except for the shape of the cone.

Where is this starflowers material?

Complex FX its the stars material... comes with Bryce. Do you think the cones looks like sparks...it was just an idea ;)

Somewhat :) I'll play with that and the rain material to see what happens.

As a relative newbie to bryce i was looking for a explosion effect and came across this technique of yours but for some reason when i try it in bryce four all i end up with is a rarther distgusting off white blob at first i tried changing the cloud sphere's shading mode this made only a slight difference any ideas on where i am going wrong

How stretched are your cone shapes? Are you using the spherical shading? Are you using the Complex FX starfield texture? I have not used any additional lights or modifu=ied anything else - white blob sounds like it isn't a volumetric texture - did you check that?? Sorry I can't be more help.

pigat, if you followed what I posted above you should get a similar picture. All I can think of is check what Kate said, make sure the material you are using is a volume material and not set to surface. Also maybe play with light intensities, perhaps it makes a difference with diferrent computers. Good luck.

I usually use a lot of small spheres and the 3d-disperse option to create sparks flying everywhere.

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COOOOOOOOOOOOLLL!!!!! i'm rendering it right now!! it looks AWESOME! thanks aldaron :)))