Topic awaiting preservation: animated explosions in Bryce?

Hi! I've been messing around with bryce 5 after receiving it as a gift. I love spaceships and I've had some successes with animating them (see my second entry in the sig competition). I want to make a space battle movie; however, I cannot get a good realistic animated explosion. Does anyone have any Bryce tips or tutorials? The only explosion tutorial for Bryce I've found through Google was not animated and wasn't that realistic.

Realistic animated explosions are hard to achieve at the best of times in the best of programs, but (not having mountains of experience with Bryce) do you have access to particle systems, glow maps, and maybe a short movie file of some fire and the ability to map it to a plane and use the black area of it as a transparency map?

I have not seen Bryce used for an explosion effect, but you might want to check out the Strata3D trial. http://shop.strata.com/Product.cfm?Product=83

It does have the abiility to create an explosive simulation, not all that realistic but none the less it is a free
download and may be usefull.
These were an attempt I did a while back using the effect in Strata.
small 180k....
bigger 800k....

[This message has been edited by kromaZ (edited 03-15-2003).]

Bryce does not have particle sytems and glow maps. Bryce reads an extra channel in a psd file as a mask. I may be able to do something if I create the material as a picture.


KromaZ, I like the movies. I'll check on Strata. I have a copy of something called Strata Basic but wasn't that impressed. I couldn't do anything with it. The lighting didn't work so all I got was black and dark gray. Maybe the Strata 3D is a upgraded version of what I have.

I used to use Bryce a lot, and what I did for explosions was make lost of those flubber-spheres with fire texture mixed in with more regular spheres with fire texture, then lots of dark cloud-textures spheres. If you animate it right, it looks pretty good (Not to mention EXTREMELY taxing on your system)

[This message has been edited by counterfeitbacon (edited 03-16-2003).]

Maya...hehehe

I used to use Bryce a lot, and what I did for explosions was make lost of those flubber-spheres with fire texture mixed in with more regular spheres with fire texture, then lots of dark cloud-textures spheres. If you animate it right, it looks pretty good (Not to mention EXTREMELY taxing on your system)

That's in line with some of the things I have been trying today but its taking 18 minutes to render a single frame. At 15 frames a second as the default, it takes me a loooooooooonnnnngggg time to even see if I am on the right path.

Is Maya or Strata faster?

Maya is a mother of all 3D apps, period ...there is nothing better than Maya...well Softimage is great but its more for character modeling

I have a volumetric fire material that I use a lot that would probably help you out in your quest for a good explosion. Email me at bwilson-24@comcast.net and I'll zip it and send it your way. Be warned however, this material is very costly when it comes to render time(as are most volumetrics) but man does it look good.

P.S. You can check out my Bryce gallery at http://www.technodreamz.com to see the material in action. And just to clarify, it's not a material I created but was created by a gentleman by the name of Clay(sorry, all I know).

Is that the fire that Brycetech used to use?

After a little searching, I found Clay's actual web site, so you can grab the material from there. Unfortunately, the renders on Clay's site really don't do the material justice.

http://claygraphics.phase2.net/volumetricfire.html

And no, I searched all over Brycetech for anything that resembles this material and found nothing close. The renders that I did find with fire in them used the default fire material that comes with Bryce.

Thanks for the link, Shard.

The Bryce-Alive Network has changed alot. After Brycetech died soemeone took the site over but then got pissed about the system requirements for the new version of Bryce and took everything down. Prior to all of that Brycetech had a tutorial called Fire and Ice that created a similiar wispy fire material. I just thought that Clay may have gotten it from her tutorial.

Regards.

Sure thing, mate... glad I could help.