Creating the Explosion

Creating the Explosion by Aziz Khan, Afghanistan

Hello everyone and welcome to creating this explosion tutorial, in this tutorial we will learn how to create a realistic looking explosion using 3ds max particle system and with a 3rd party plug-in called FumeFX, well in this tutorial I will give you an idea of  how to figure out your scene for a explosion, the settings here are only the kick start you can go further and further by tweaking the values, so lets get started.

1- First thing first, fire up your 3ds max and go to your particles system and then click on (Particle View) showing the image below.

2- From your particle view window right click and and do as image is showing.



3- Since we created our flow, we need few more operators to handle this effect, so again the particle view, right click and choose as image is indicating.

4- So now your birth operator is in the particle view, right click over your display and do as image is showing you below.



5- since we created our position icon operator, its time to add a delete operator, I will tell you all why I am adding these operators, so again right click and choose as image is indicating below. 



6- Last but not the least we will add speed operator in our particle flow system, as before right click and follow as image is showing you. 

7- As we are all set with our operators its time to configure them to achieve our desired effect or I should say desired settings for an explosion, since all of our operators are in the list and ready to go, one last thing to do is to connect our particle flow with our operators to work, as you can see there is a blue dot in your PF source, click and drag it over the circle in your operator event and release your mouse, now we are set and connected ready to go.

Here I will give brief description about the operators we are using.

1- Birth operator will control the birth rate of our particles in the scene, we will tell it after certain amount of time stop emitting and we dont need anymore particles to flow, or the amount of particles we are looking for.

2- Display operator its pretty self explanatory what sort of shape for the particles to be showed in the scene.

3- Position operator is where you want to emit particles from a particle emitter shape in the scene.

4- Speed operator as it says speed, you could set your speed variation as well as your divergence for your particles in the scene.

5- Delete operator will delete the particles after cretin amount of time according to the settings we are figured out.

So these were the basic understanding of the operators we are going to use in this tutorials or i mentioned them above, for the moment we are all good to go, below is the settings i have used for my particle source to create a explosion.

8- It's time to create a FumeFX container, to do follow the image below.



9- Now create one with the approximately settings in your scene, make sure your FumeFX container encompasses particle flow.

0- Now go to your helpers from drop down menu choose FumeFX and create particle source in your scene.




11- It's time to add our particle and particle source helper to FumeFX object source to do so, open up FumeFX UI and then click on the button called Obj/Src then pick the related source to its appropriate place, as showing image below.




12- still in the object source scroll down to bottom and do a bit of tweaking as indicating in the image below.



13- Still with the FumeFX UI open click on the general tab "Gen" and do the settings showing in the image below.

Note: if you want to get more fine result then play with the values in the Spacing, the higher the values for lower quality, lesser the values for higher quality but its render expensive and will take time in simulation calculation keep in mind.



14- In the Simulation tab "Sim" do the settings as illustrating in the image below, I recommend you to play with different values to see what you got, its always good to see different things.

15- Still in the Sim tab scroll down to the bottom and do the settings as showing below.

16- Now jump to rendering tab "Rend" first thing to do is Right click on the color bar and load the color gradient, I am providing you for fire effect download here, by doing this it will help you safe your time, later on you could sit relax and create one you like, so play with the settings as showing the image below.



17- We are done with our settings so its time to check our explosion, to simulate our scene click on the play button showing below.



18- Once you finished simulating, you could see your end result in your preview window as well as in your viewport by checking fire, smoke or fuel, and now you should see something like below, if you are all gone correct.



I have rendered my 100 frames animation and i came up with really nice looking result. 

Here you could download my end animation and here is my end scene download

Here we are finished with our tutorial, I hope you learnt something cool from this tutorial.

If you have any comments suggestions please feel free to contact me at aziz3d@hotmail.co.uk or you could visit my website at www.cggeeks.com for more of my tutorials and useful stuff, my site is new and has few of my old tutorials, I am populating it with my new stuffs soon. Good luck!