Final

Particle 1: Explosion + Shockwave

Reference:

Concept Sketches:

Particle 2: Spiralling Projectile Trail

Particle 1: Explosion + Shockwave

I am choosing an explosion with a shockwave for the first particle that utilizes a burst effect.

Reference:

Since it has multiple use cases for different kinds of projects and has a lot of opportunities to make unique shapes.

Concept Sketches:

The explosion would start off as a quick flash that expands very quickly then shrinks and expands again into a black cloud with bright flames expanding outwards from inside the clouds. At the end, clouds separate, get smaller, then disappear all together.

Particle 2: Spiralling Projectile Trail

For my second particle effect, I chose to go with a spiraling projectile trail. I was inspired to do this VFX because the gyorjet, a concept rocket firing pistol, fires a projectile that spirals from the jets in the rear of the rocket which creates a very unique visual for a very unique weapon.

Reference:

Concept Sketches:

The effect starts off with the ignition of the rocket and then four separate flames appear. The four small flames stretch creating a bigger single flame then they begin to spiral.

What I Chose

For the final VFX, I chose to do the explosion because of the many use cases across different projects and, in the case of the scale of this effect, works well in the background and far away environment visuals.

Instead of using Houdini, I chose to render the effect in Blender!

Why Blender you may ask?

The reasons I chose this software instead of Houdini are because it is easily accessible and very affordable, incredibly powerful and capable of doing most everything Houdini can do in terms of VFX and procedural generation with geometry nodes, incredibly user friendly and straightforward, not as hardware or software-intensive, more and more studios/companies are adopting it thanks to easy integration, can work on the same project across different version updates (to an extent), and far more helpful resources.

Starting Out

First I opened a new project in Blender and created a torus shape. In the modifiers menu, I then subdivided and used a deform modifier to give the mesh a unique shape that would influence how to explosion looks.

Making the Domain

To prep for the effect, I made a box to use as the domain which is where it will render the visual effect, and a plane to use for collision so the smoke and flames remain the surface.

Making the Boom!

To begin making the effect, I applied a Fluid emitter to the torus and set the Type to Flow and Flow Type to Fire + Smoke. I would do the same to the box but set the Type to Domain so the effect can appear. I adjusted the settings for the explosion in the emitter settings for both the emitter object itself and the domain. In the domain, I would adjust the gravity, dissolve timing, and the noise to create variation in the smoke, and in the emitter, I would change the way the way the smoke disperses and spreads.

To create the spread effect, I animated the torus shape so it would expand in the beginning then go back to it's original shape quickly.

Rendering

Now that I finished the effect and adjusted the settings, in the shader editor, I made a quick material to adjust the look of the smoke and the density, then I put the camera in an orthographic view, set the max frames to 64 and FPS to 30, and rendered the frames. I then quickly brought the images into Houdini to make the flipbook.

Niagara Setup

In Niagara, I recreated the smoke effect and made a new material using the new flipbook to render.

Conclusion

VFX_05_gpatinki.mp4

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