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DarkBASIC Professional Discussion / Explosions which don't look crap

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adr
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Posted: 1st Jul 2003 12:39
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I spent a little time last night trying to make a decent explosion:
http://www.fuzzee.co.uk/game/shot11.jpg
While it's almost cool, it's got that oh-so-retro quake2 feel to it. I've basically got a fire texture, and applied it to two rotating, expanding and fading spheres. I've also made a ghosted plain, which is textured to look like a shockwave. The rotation is slightly off between spheres to give it an interesting effect....

I tried adding a particle emmitter, but it always looks like a sparkler!

Any suggestions?
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Attreid
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Posted: 1st Jul 2003 14:18
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you could try to make a 3d model, and then to animate it

"He will come...the voice from the outer world,
bringing the holy war, the Jihad, which will cleanse the Universe and bring us out of darkness."
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adr
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Posted: 1st Jul 2003 14:31
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But that requires modelling skills, of which I have none. That helicopter took a whole weekend and it's still shit!

That is a fairly good idea though - wouldn't have a clue where to start though...
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kevil
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Posted: 1st Jul 2003 14:47
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Why don't make it like most games and just use an explosion texture. Maybe a bit like my explosions in my asteroids game. They looked kinda pretty.

BTW you are allowed to use my explosion textures. To get them, download my retro compo entry (#5 in the rating, Galactic Chaos) and just rip the textures. I don't mind.






Kevil

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Bulleyes
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Posted: 1st Jul 2003 15:58
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Hi kevil,

I just downloaded Galactic Chaos. The explosion looks cool. Is it an animated explosion texture on a billboarded plane? How do you apply animated texture on a plane by the way? As far as I recall, DBpro only support animated texture via AVI, and AVI files can't contain any alpha channel.

Do you apply the animation manually? i.e. apply the animation texture frame by frame to the 3D Model? Isn't that tedious especially you need to deal with the animation timing.

Gosh... I certainly wish DBpro can support animated texture like they did for animated sprite, i.e. just specify a image file with all the animation frames separated in each cell.

Bad Nose Entertainment - Where games are forged from the flames of talent and passion.

http://www.badnose.com/
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adr
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Posted: 1st Jul 2003 16:04
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The trouble with space explosions, is that we can assume they'd be pefectly spherical. Even if they shouldn't be, it still looks right.

Perfectly spherical explosions here on earth just look plain weird.
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kevil
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Posted: 1st Jul 2003 16:18
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But all the commercial games use animated textures on a billboarded plane or something. Using volumetric explosions is only done for the newest games, so there must be a way to make your explosion look good "on earth" by using textures and a plane.

Bulleyes:
I use some code to change the texture on the plane. Say the explosion textures are images 1-10. Then I'd use a float variable to handle the current texture and then do it like this.

rem to initiate it
texture#=1.00

rem to run the animation
texture object (plane object),int(texture#)
texture#=texture#+0.50
if texture#>=11 then (delete explosion)

That's how I did it. You can change the "0.50" to any value until you get the speed you want.

Kevil

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Critters
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Posted: 1st Jul 2003 16:22
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hehe thanx thats great!

I oftern experience problems with decent explosions

Martin Wyatt

http://www.freewebs.com/jaxteam/
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adr
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Posted: 1st Jul 2003 17:11
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Quote: "there must be a way to make your explosion look good "on earth" by using textures and a plane."


I did consider billboarding, but then I need a decent explosion sprite sequence...
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kevil
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Posted: 1st Jul 2003 17:35
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You're right with that. That's the hardest part. I made my explosions entirely myself, but I can understand it is hard for you.

Kevil

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adr
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Posted: 1st Jul 2003 18:53
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I wouldn't mind using my current set up if I could add some particles.

yeah yeah, I know "make particles", but how would I change the emission radius - I want the particles to emit from an area, rather than from a point. Point emission makes it look like a sparkler.
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Bulleyes
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Posted: 1st Jul 2003 19:07
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Erm... make a bigger particle texture, and play around with different velocity. That's what I used for explosion using particles. Still, I prefer animated explosion texture + particle effects = real cool explosion effects.

Bad Nose Entertainment - Where games are forged from the flames of talent and passion.

http://www.badnose.com/
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adr
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Posted: 1st Jul 2003 19:40
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Quote: "make a bigger particle texture"

That'll just make bigger blobs ... hmm - had another idea anyway

http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/1932/SUPP/large07.jpg

I know I'm probably a while off that , however, it gave me the idea of using several textured spheres (like 12 or so) which scale at different rates, giving it that random explodyness...
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kevil
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Posted: 1st Jul 2003 21:08
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You could do that, but I would still advice you to use some animated texture, because that looks best on an explosion.

Kevil

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Shadow Robert
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Posted: 1st Jul 2003 22:07
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shizzle tha nvidia explosion is volume textured pixel shader... they're not even close to easy to do either because depthing them properly is a bitch.

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adr
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Posted: 2nd Jul 2003 01:00 Edited at: 2nd Jul 2003 02:09
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I've got 10 spheres which appear randomly around the point of impact, grow and fade. It looks cool enough for me

Unfortunately, it's slowing my P900 laptop down, so that means I've got a minimum requirement already!

Once I've got crash collision working, I'll post a demo. It's proving difficult to tell when the rotors have hit the ground matrix ..

----------

getting this shot caused slow down on my 2ghz p4... hmm, something needs optimising:
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Dr DooMer
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Posted: 2nd Jul 2003 02:04
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The last time I had to make some animated explosions, I used 3D Studio Max - under the environmental effects or something, there's an explosion generator. It doesn't look too great, but it does have quite a few parameters and is a quick way of generating lots of frames.

I don't know, because I haven't used it, but GMax might be able to do something like that as well and, if not, there's probably some explosion generators on the net somewhere.

"I am a living, thinking entity who was created in the sea of information."
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kevil
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Posted: 2nd Jul 2003 03:27
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Ow, don't use the fade command. I remember when I used it and it caused a big slowdown. Use textures that get darker instead. It has the same effect, but faster.

Kevil

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Shadow Robert
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Posted: 2nd Jul 2003 05:21
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i just use the alpha channel seems easier

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Dreamora
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Posted: 2nd Jul 2003 05:42
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cool kevil ... this sort of explosion texture was exactly what i was trying over and over again without any success ... when i will ever reach testing stage i will put this in my credits

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Dave J
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Posted: 2nd Jul 2003 08:50
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Yeah, 3D Studio Max can do some awesome explosions quite easily, then you can just render them and export it to an animation and texture it to a plain.

"Computers are useless they can only give you answers."
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adr
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Posted: 2nd Jul 2003 12:15
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Quote: "Ow, don't use the fade command. I remember when I used it and it caused a big slowdown. Use textures that get darker instead. It has the same effect, but faster."


I'll keep that in mind if it gets any worse. That screenshot technically is the worst possible case. 40 ghosted/faded spheres, with another 300 ghosted/faded plains for the missile trail. I may drop the number of spheres used for the explosions and I'll certainly drop or leave configurable the number of smoke trail plains.
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Darkcoder
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Posted: 2nd Jul 2003 12:50
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Check this FREE explosion generator out:

http://www.geocities.com/starlinesinc/

System: 1.333Ghz Athlon Thunderbird, 512meg, Geforce 4 Ti 4400.

Hardware /nm./: the part of the computer that you can kick.
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Attreid
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Posted: 2nd Jul 2003 13:54
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hey, it's a good programm
a very good one !

"He will come...the voice from the outer world,
bringing the holy war, the Jihad, which will cleanse the Universe and bring us out of darkness."
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