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    • Explosions

       EV Developer's Corner
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      I did a search, but the questions, though similar to mine, were never answered. Erg.

      How did ATMOS make the explosions in Nova?

      What I'm trying to do is make a new set of explosions, but I don't know how. And editing the colors in Photoshop doesn't work, because they get washed out and multicolored.

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      ( (url="http://"http://www.webanimag.com/ayb/")All your smurf are belong to smurf!(/url) )( Generic (url="http://"http://ww.evula.com")EVula(/url) link )( monster! )
      Mantaray: Supergenius and idiot rolled into one!

      (This message has been edited by Mantaray (edited 08-24-2002).)

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      The best explosions I know of that you could make would be with a 3D app of sorts (I will reccommend strata 3.0, but I'm sure most people will disagree with me on this hot topic of debate). There are usually tutorials and advice available to make a nice explosion with one of these (I like stratacafe.com).
      I am sure that with practice, however, you could easily do the editing in photoshop.

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      Fret for your Pilot.
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      Quote

      Originally posted by Mantaray:
      How did ATMOS make the explosions in Nova?

      HyperVoxels, if I'm not mistaken.

      Quote

      Originally posted by Arada Pilot:
      The best explosions I know of that you could make would be with a 3D app of sorts (I will reccommend strata 3.0, but I'm sure most people will disagree with me on this hot topic of debate). There are usually tutorials and advice available to make a nice explosion with one of these (I like stratacafe.com).
      I am sure that with practice, however, you could easily do the editing in photoshop.

      I've done decent-ish looking ones in Infini-D, but that's with a good amount of post-processing in Photoshop.

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      Well, shoot, I guess I need to get 500 dollars for Lightwave. Hmmmm... Hey daaad?

      ah, well, I guess I'll put the special fx lower on my list.

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      ( (url="http://"http://www.webanimag.com/ayb/")All your smurf are belong to smurf!(/url) )( Generic (url="http://"http://ww.evula.com")EVula(/url) link )( monster! )
      Mantaray: Supergenius and idiot rolled into one!

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      Quote

      Originally posted by Mantaray:
      **Well, shoot, I guess I need to get 500 dollars for Lightwave. Hmmmm... Hey daaad?

      ah, well, I guess I'll put the special fx lower on my list.

      **

      $395 (USD)... If you're a student. Otherwise, it's $1,595)

      There are other ways to get explosions, though albeit they don't look anywhere near as good. For instance, you could record a cherry-bomb or the like exploding on a black matt and then remove the background in photoshop, frame-by-frame.

      And as I said, If you can get something that does particle systems - rendered as polygons - then you can get decent-ish looking explosions. (Infini-D well run you between $30 and $100 on eBay.)

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      Heh, you wanna get really good explosions. Find an app with a killer particle generator 🙂

      You can do it in Photoshop, but it's time consuming and prone to error. Various effects programs can do it well, I imagine you could map out the backround of a real explosion but it would be time consuming. It really depends on exactly what you are trying to do. If you are just trying to make a colored explosion you can do it in Photoshop by changing the hues. But still, if you want to make a really good explosion the only apps I know of are Maya, Animation:Master, and 3DS StudioMax. Maya is about $6,000 nearly all movies use Maya for their special effects, A:M is only $300 but is rather unreliable on the Mac, 3DS StudioMax is what was used to make all the Blizzard Cinematics (The Diablo Series, The Warcraft Series, The Starcraft Series), I don't know the exact price but you can bet it's 1,000+ dollars. I haven't used Lightwave but it probably does pretty good stuff, I imagine Electric Image is also good.

      What are you trying to make?

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      The Evil Spoonman

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      (quote)Originally posted by Evil_Spoonman:
      **Heh, you wanna get really good explosions. Find an app with a killer particle generator

      (quote)Originally posted by Evil_Spoonman:
      3DS StudioMax is what was used to make all the Blizzard Cinematics (The Diablo Series, The Warcraft Series, The Starcraft Series), I don't know the exact price but you can bet it's 1,000+ dollars.** (/quote)

      I'm not sure about WarCraft 1/2, or StarCraft, but Diablo was done in LightWave. Though, D2/War3 were done in 3DS Max. If I'm not mistaken, there's a Kick-arse fire generator plugin for it, which may be why Blizzard used 3DS Max for them.

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      Posted Image

      I think HyperVoxels is the way to go.

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      ( (url="http://"http://www.webanimag.com/ayb/")All your smurf are belong to smurf!(/url) )( Generic (url="http://"http://ww.evula.com")EVula(/url) link )( monster! )
      Mantaray: Supergenius and idiot rolled into one!

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      yeah Lightwave!

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      Adventure Dog: Everyone's favorite little black and white dog.
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      Hmmmm, I think I may have been proved wrong on several points here 🙂

      I think I shall take a closer look into HyperVoxels, I have read reviews on it, most said that it was slow with a shallow interface and good particle generation. That was 8 months ago, what version is it at now?

      3DS Max is windows only, but it's a superb program, it's almost worth getting a Windows machine to run it, almost. I hope they come out with 3DS for Mac OS X sometime in the near future, although they probably won't.

      Maya is still around $5,999, I belive, I think you can get it for $2,500 with an academic discount though, not sure. By all means, Lightwave is an amazing program, I've used it several times under OS X and been surprised each time by how powerful it is.

      Youa are not mistaken, there is a kick-ars fire generator for 3DS Max. I actually don't know about Warcraft I and II, I do know that Warcraft II Battle.net edition was done in 3DS Max and Warcraft III as well. As a side note, have you seen the Warcraft III Cinematics, "Impressive" would be an understatement. Starcraft and Brood War where done in 3DS Max as was Diablo II and Lord Of Destruction, I have no idea what they made Diablo I in, it never worked correctly on my computer and always looked washed out and wierd. Just for the record, Blizzard didn't say anything when I E-Mailed their Tech Support about it.

      I took the time to look at more HyperVoxels work before I finised this reply and I do belive it is a very good thing to look into. Glad you could catch my mistakes 😉

      Thanx

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      The Evil Spoonman

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      Quote

      Originally posted by Evil_Spoonman:
      **As a side note, have you seen the Warcraft III Cinematics, "Impressive" would be an understatement.
      **

      Indeed. I have watched the game trailer a few times, just to get the goosebumps.

      Why doesn't ILM do this good a job?

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      Quote

      Originally posted by Mantaray:
      **Indeed. I have watched the game trailer a few times, just to get the goosebumps.

      **

      The trailer is NOTHING compared to the cutscenes "Medivh's Warning" and "Arthas' Betrayal". I dont know what freaks where hired at Blizzard since Brood War but the marvelous intro movie of the SC expansion looks like a piece of junk compared to the WC movies. Note: Blizzard used a lot of plug-ins and home-made programs alongside 3DSMax (see the "Art of Warcraft" book for more info), you cannot achieve that quality with the standard 3d Studio Max package.

      LW is considered to be a step lower than 3d Studio MAx and Maya -Maya has several very different packages- but the price is ridiculously low for a product of that class.

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      Quote

      Originally posted by Evil_Spoonman:
      **Hmmmm, I think I may have been proved wrong on several points here:)

      I think I shall take a closer look into HyperVoxels, I have read reviews on it, most said that it was slow with a shallow interface and good particle generation. That was 8 months ago, what version is it at now?

      **

      Oh and Hypervoxels are at version 3.0 in LW 7.5. But the HV plug is not used for particle animation. You can use Hypervoxels drawing with the Lightwave particle FX modules but particle interaction and animation are not integrated in Hypervoxels.

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      Pesmo's Profile Refresh no. 13
      I am to tired to think of something I could potentially write here and the perspective that no one would ever read that (yet inexistant) signature discourages me even more.

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      This is all well and good, but I was wondering if anyone knew of a program/s3d plug similar to hypervoxels... preferably shareware/free. I need to do some explosions, and don't exactly have the money for lightwave.

      Thanks,
      SpacePirate

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      I showed all the Warcraft III movies to my friend a little while ago (I own the game), he's a very experianced animator and veteran of the computing world. Man, he went nuts over these movies, you should have seen him when I showed him Arthas Betrayal 🙂

      Have any of you noticed how the audio tends to lag behind the video by as much as a half a second, it most noticable in Medivh's Warning becuase of all the talking going on. I have contaced Blizzard about this issue and they say its a flaw in the DIV X Player that they use. Anyway, It really stinks becuase I didn't get the DVD so I can't view them any other way.

      I wish knew the particle generator that Blizzard used for WC III. They do such good particles in those cinematics. They have great fire, GREAT sand, rose petals, dust, all the particles they do in WC are just phenominal.

      I'll go with SpacePirate here. I was wondering if anyone knew of a program/s3d plug similar to hypervoxels... preferably shareware/free. I need to have some fun, and don't exactly have the money for lightwave. 🙂

      Thanx

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      The Evil Spoonman

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      (quote)Originally posted by Evil_Spoonman:
      **I showed all the Warcraft III movies to my friend a little while ago (I own the game), he's a very experianced animator and veteran of the computing world. Man, he went nuts over these movies, you should have seen him when I showed him Arthas Betrayal:)

      (quote)Originally posted by Evil_Spoonman:
      **I'll go with SpacePirate here. I was wondering if anyone knew of a program/s3d plug similar to hypervoxels... preferably shareware/free. I need to have some fun, and don't exactly have the money for lightwave.;)

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      If you are only planning an EV Nova plug-ins, and even if you want to integrate good cinematics, LW's integrated Particle FX system and a little knowledge of it is more than sufficient.

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      Pesmo's Profile Refresh no. 13
      I am to tired to think of something I could potentially write here and the perspective that no one would ever read that (yet inexistant) signature discourages me even more.

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      Cinema 4D XL has some good particle generation. You can download the demo from
      (url="http://"http://www.maxon.net/index_e.html")http://www.maxon.net/index_e.html(/url)

      The Demo won't save anything, but if you are a student i've seen the full version around $250 (creation engine magazine) If you get version 7 you can buy a physics add-on and do fun things like dominos falling or objects falling into water and causing ripples.

      It won't do explosions as a setting, but you can tell light sources to be visible (like lightsaber blades), to have some sort of turbulence, animate the color over the life of the particle and after the fire increase the dust. You can get a pretty neat fire to smoke effect. Then put them in the emitter (like a folder) and press play, then halfway thru, stop and render. Tweak to satisfaction.

      This may seem like an ad, please don't think so. I just found it to be more user friendly than Lightwave and softimage XSI. But of course, your choice.

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      Cinema 4D has a halfway decent partical system, though I doubt it's in the same league as LW...

      Just FYI, Weta, the graphics team behind Lord of the Rings used Maya. They made a custom fire simulation for the Balrog... the only problem being that it was so realistic that if the Balrog moved to fast it blew itself out 😛 There's a $500 plugin for Maya to do it.

      As for the divX problem, it's fixed in 5.0a2 and better (a3 is current), and the problem was in QuickTime iirc, not the DivX module, to do with MP3 soundtracks.

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      --sitharus
      (url="http://"http://www.sitharus.com/tuxtime/")MacOS X TuxTime Client(/url) - v1.3 last time I checked
      Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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      Quote

      Originally posted by Artanis:
      **
      It won't do explosions as a setting
      **

      Yeh, it does... If you make an object with the right shape etc you can use the explosion tweening thing (on the menu with the funny twisty thing icon) it does a patch explosion...

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      --sitharus
      (url="http://"http://www.sitharus.com/tuxtime/")MacOS X TuxTime Client(/url) - v1.3 last time I checked
      Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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