make digi explosions like the ones on ep iii

Jedi2016 - if you ever get a gathering of your work online let us know, eh? I'd like to see more of what you've done sometime.

 

OK back on topic and to settle this thing, yes there are a lot of digital explosions (as in fire, not just smoke) in Ep. 3. Got back from the VES Festival 2005 and the guys at ILM explained it. They even showed a turntable animation of an animated explosion. In some instances they combined pyro elements with CG. But usually any explosion where the camera is moving around in 3D the explosion is CG.

Did you notice all the vehicle and debry reacting premature to the water hitting it? Someone either messed up the compositing or the physics settings. ... Most likely the physics during the particle animation. You always want to take shortcuts in pretty much any situation that requires dynamics.

Maybe the shots are not clear but that's not the case. You could actually see the objects reacting to the water when they were hit, not before, on the Tweak simulations.

That was because how Tweak approached the shots. They wrote their own custom fluid dynamics systems (in a week), which they thought would be the hard part. The other thing they wrote was a system that would generate particle systems for when the water would hit things like cars, to create splashes and the like. So the system would account the impact of the water with objects (like cars) automatically, so cars and debris would move when hit.

In the end the automatic particle system for splashes and crests didn't work as well as expected so they had to add particle systems by hand for all collisions and the like, but the system was still moving dynamially. There was no hand animation so as to have "premature" movement of objects.

 

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up. I saw the presentation at SIGGRAPH and then spoke with the ILM guy in charge of those shots. Even the first fireball (that the fighters fly through) is 99% CG. For that one they did comp a bit of smoke and fire elements to punch it up a bit, but it was pretty much CG.