Exploding Manholes by Atoman

Cinema 4D • (none) • posted on Jul 14, 2002

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Description

This was the first proper image that I created using pyrocluster. It was created to illustrate a magazine article on the phenomena of exploding manholes (happens a lot in Washington when it rains apparently). It took a lot of experimentation and many test renders to get what I condidered to be a reasonably realistic explosion effect.

Comments (6)

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Erik0815Erik

7:43AM | Sun, 14 July 2002

pyro is hard to use, you've done a good job :-) I like the image instead of I dont understand why it explose because of rain (nitro-rain in washington?)

Atoman

7:54AM | Sun, 14 July 2002

Cheers Erik. Apparently there are electricity cables running through the sewer/drain pipes and when it rains very heavily these are shorted out and cause explosions (igniting methane maybe?) I don't have the article here but I seem to think that people do occaisionally get killed by these flying manhole covers. The article was very general and also talked about a lot of manhole related deaths in Mexico so that the illustration didn't need to be too specific.

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cartesius

8:41AM | Sun, 14 July 2002

Very good and convincing image. Only thing I would like to comment is that the actual burst should be more "situated" in the hole. Now it's more floating above the opening and to give a more convincing impression of a powerful blast, the flames should start below ground and stretch upwards. (Like if there was a jet-engine at full blast some 30 feet down.) Hope you understand what I'm trying to say here ;)

Atoman

9:16AM | Sun, 14 July 2002

Thanks Cartesius. I know what you mean about the blast and gave it a lot of thought, but I spent a while going through tons of pix on the net of gas explosions and most of them seemed to start burning well above the actual point of ignition. In this case the emitter is actually well inside the hole but due to the age of the particles you don't see the burn until well beyond. In the end I didn't have enough time to really experiment with this image as I only had 24hrs to submit finished artwork on this job.

daltonmonaie

1:53PM | Sun, 14 July 2002

I think, i know, why it explode above the holes... If there's only methane and maybe nitrogen, the gas cannot explode, cause theres no oxyd. Near the manhole covers the oxyd can get in the pipes a little. In your cases the explosion is growing while it "hiking" (lol) up to the cover. When the prssure is hard enough and the manhole cover can fly away, there is suddenly very much oxyd and the explotion can expand in very short time. This phenomen could look out like this picture! Which one's very nice! I like this style.

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