*** Quicktime EXPLOSION clips for your fanfilms ! ! ! ***

and another bump from me!

GRAAGH! When my DSL is finally up and working--maybe two weeks from now--I'll have decent access to my websapce again and I can post some of my explosions. But for now... sorry.

Sorry to be absent from this thread for so long...

Pixel, yes, my clip was done with Sitni Sati's Afterburn. Like I said before, I've made quite a few attempts at doing an Afterburn explosion like the one I posted, and I've never really been happy with the results. The settings I used for this clip were mostly a happy accident. The trouble is that because Afterburn works with its own AEC controllers, it can be a bit hard to tweak. The system that drives the look of the Afterburn explosion consists of three Superspray Particle systems, two Drag spacewarps and six Omni lights. To make the explosion look good, all of these, as well as the Afterburn effect itself, need to be adjusted separately, and kept in sync with each other. It's difficult, and it's tedious. I have an idea that a system could be devised using Maxscript to bind everything together and make adjustment easier, but I'm hopeless at scripting.

Of course, I can produce a lot more clips like the one I posted, by reseeding the particle systems and repositioning the camera to shoot the explosion from another angle, but I want to work on it a little bit first... The main problem is that all of the explosions would take the same amount of time to play out. That'd get monotonous after a while.

Obi-Juan, understood about the keying issue, but the same thing applies to real pyro clips like the Artbeats stuff, doesn't it? Of course, I can provide an alpha channel for my explosions, but the way that they're done means that the gas cloud doesn't really disperse at all, it just fades to black because of the attenuation and falloff of the lights in the scene. I don't think you could use my clips to do convincing explosions against light coloured backgrounds all that easily...

Is it possible you could make these avi files?

Race

If no one does, I'd recommend going to www.radgametools.com and downloading Bink. That'll convert just about anything to anything.

Obi-Juan :

Thanks for those, I used them today and they were fantastic. I had troubles working with them at first because it bugged in Premiere but I re-exported them and then it worked. Premiere isn't the best program for compositing but I managed to get satisfying results. A lot of it comes from the fact that your explosions look great in the first place. Thanks !

I am glad my idea has been well recieved, and I anxiously wait to see some more explosions (while trying to make my own, of course)

Juan

I never tried to create explosions in MAX. I always use the footage at artbeats.com. It is royalty free. They are a bit small, and only 15 fps, but I find them very very usefull.

Setting the Transfer Mode to Screen doesn't alwys work very well because the orange usually gets too transparent. If I don't have an alpha matte for the footage, I use the color difference key and key out the black.

Hey those are great, i have one problem with 'em, unless the explosion is completely contained within the proportions of the video when we go to use 'em, we are limited as to where we put the explosion in another composition. So if they were rendered with a wider camera view and the explosion never hitting an edge, they would be a lot more flexible.
(hope that made some sort of sense)

great job tho,
late

Mister X : The only thing I would suggest is giving the explosion a more orange color. That's just personal preference of course. I don't like white fire clouds like the artbeats explosions. I like them to be orange, bright, and churning.

S'funny, but I don't like orange explosions myself. I like 'em purple

Seriously though, those fiery looking explosions are gasoline explosions. It's not really a case of just changing the colour - burning gasoline has quite a different look to explosively discharged vapour that's illuminated from within by the combustible material that gives off the vapour. There are pyrotechnic recipes that will give orange clouds, of course, but they don't look the same as gas bombs. I could try and get a gas bomb look, but I think it will take too long to render, and/or be too much of a pain to set up right.

On a related note, I mentioned this a way back when those Artbeat explosions got taken down, but I have my own personal copy of VCE's Pyromania Pro, and most of those are very fiery looking, orange explosions. I said at the time, kind of as a joke, that I could make my own movies of the explosions in the Pyromania clips and share them around without violating the license agreement.

I borrowed a CD of Artbeats clips for reference, and the Artbeats license specifically says that you can't redistribute the clips as pyro clips regardless of how much you modify them, but the VCE license doesn't say the same thing. This is exactly what it says in the VCE License:

"This nontransferable and non-exclusive license states that by purchasing a copy of Pyromania! PRO you are licensed to use the images to promote your products, ideas or message with no additional fees.

"You may use these images, make multimedia or video presentations from them or use them in printed pieces as long as you are not duplicating or selling the images as an entire product unto themselves.

"Do not make a copy of this CD-ROM or transfer the images in their entirety to another medium for sale or distribution to any other party. You may not make a product that is sold with the primary value being the
images contained on this CD-ROM".

I would interpret that to mean that provided I don't just use the clips as they are, and provided I don't try and sell them, I'm free to make my own pyro clips for you guys using the VCE clips. What do you all think?

You may use these images, make multimedia or video presentations from them or use them in printed pieces as long as you are not duplicating or selling the images as an entire product unto themselves

As long as you modify them a bit or add something else you can always publish them for non-commercial purpouses.

Who am I to argue with that??

Seriously, these clips are wonderful and I hope to be making a few of my own.

Not only am I interested in the fiery explosions (engulfing an unfortunate ship or planet), but also in the surface explosions that can be used to demonstrate missiles hitting hulls, etc (especially in atmospheric battles).

My question, open to all:

I?m relatively new to compositing and was wondering if Premiere or After Effects is the better program. Also, what background color is best for compositing (e.g black for explosions, green/blue for ships)

I was thinking after rendering components with correct background colors in Max (3), I could use After Effects to assemble the composition (although I really am not clear on the animating layers bit). Premiere could then piece together shots in order and do wipes, etc.

Any advise would be of great help.

Half a mo'... if what I'm gleaning from this is accurate, you folks composite your explosions into the shot in post?

I suppose that's one way to do it, but I've found that my life is a lot easier if I simply map the explosion onto a plane in MAX, set the material to additive (which eliminates the need to do any chromakeying or alpha, and makes the explosion glow rather nicely as well), set the camera as the plane's LookAt object, and Bob's your uncle. No need for any rendering of the elements of the shot more than once or compositing... Simple and sweet.

*shrug* Just a suggestion, tho...

A question, though.

I've never been too clear on the definitive definition of "additive" material.

Care to elaborate on what it does and how it works? (Does it only work with a black BG for example).

Thanks.

Oh, joy...color theory.

Okay, lesse...to understand it, you need to know a little bit of color theory. Mixing colors together is a great way to produce new colors--everybody knows that tellow and blue make green, red and yellow make orange, and so on--but the way colors react to each other differs greatly depending on how the colors are being mixed.
For example, light is an additive color system. The more colors you have, the closer your end result gets to white. Pure white, in an additive color system, contains every color. With a subtractive color system, all the colors together is the opposite, it's black.
So, essentially, a translucent object that is additive will add its colors to anything behind it. This is easiest explained numerically:

Black is represented, in RGB, as 0,0,0. Black, on an additive object, adds absolutely nothing to the colors behind it, and so those colors appear exactly as they are.
Take, on the other hand, brown. Say we have RGB values of 181, 131, 91, and behind it we have blue and yellow, RGB values 0,144,255 and 255,216,0 respectively. The additive brown object is placed so that it overlaps the blue and the yellow. Because it is additive, it adds it's RGB values to the colors behind it, so the yellow (255,216,0) added to the brown (181,131,91) equals 436, 347, 91. But because color on a computer usually maxes out at 255, that means our resulting color would be 255, 255, 91, which is actually just a lighter yellow. The blue, OTOH, comes out to 181, 255, 255, which is a much lighter blue.
Here is an example of the different color types using a lens flare mapped onto a flat piece of geometry, all set to 99% opacity. A is normal, and only tints the background. B is additive, and looks kind of glowy. C is subtractive, and doesn't look like much, unfortunately for this example.

I hope that helps. (For the record, the example is taken from a tutorial website I'm building for MAX. It's under heavy construction, but you can look it over, if you like...

Its good you post your questions (and answers) but as they are turning to a completely different subject..., lets just make sure this topics stays in posting and commenting on explosion clips!

Well, this question (and answer) grew out of the explosion question. I, personally, put my explosions directly into MAX as bitmapped planes...which are set to Additive. It all fits in.

Yeah, that question was OK, but I feared that it would drive the topic into another subject (as I myself I am doing right now! )... anyway. I'll try to key out the black instead of transfering on screen mode with Mister-x Explosion...

My bad. Didn't mean to drive an off-topic subject. At least it wasn't waaaay off: a question about using the explosion clips

Anyhoo... I am now trying to make the explosion clips... I hope they turn out ok.

BUMP

how about smoke effects?

Well, I've been avoiding smoke because there is usually no smoke in space but I suppose it deserves a mention. I'll be looking for some clips.

BUMP!

I've been trying these two explosion tutorials for max, and they seem very good for still images but I am not sure how they can be animated.


www.scifi-meshes.com/tutorials/Monty/monty.html


www.scifi-meshes.com/tutorials/SFA/Explosion.htm

BUMP

Wow, there were lots of posts this weekend! This thread fell from first to fifth page in two days!