Smoke reference

I know I'm going to need this later on, so here is a really helpful article about smoke and explosions.

http://www.blendernation.com/2013/03/12/how-to-render-large-scale-smoke/

light explosion

Explosions can behave very differently depending on the color of background and lighting. Here is almost the exact same settings for the smoke (with an improved domain) but a different color background. The smoke has apparently gone from light grey to dark grey. It hasn't really changed color, but in contrast to the background it looks different. It's the little things like this that matter in CG!

Rendered in 1080 x 1920 (not 1920 x 1080)

Resolution:     120

Smoke high resolution:     4

Dissolve:  1/40

And this time the domain is almost big enough...

Explosion test video

Here's the render!



As you can see, I made the domain too small. I'd redo it and just post the better version, but it takes a really long time to recalculate the smoke. I had about 72 GB of smoke cache files from this video!

Explosion render

It's late, so this is all I'm going to post for now, just a teaser: 

Settings were as follows:

Smoke resolution:     100

Smoke high resolution:     4

Render: 4K png 50% compression

Blender version:     2.59 (r39307)

Those smoke resolutions take up a lot of resources though. It was using almost 2 GB of memory each time it computed a frame. It goes without saying that it used all the CPU! For about 60 frames, it took almost 8 GB smoke cache.

Explosions!

I finally found a really good looking explosion made in blender. Here's a link: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?230329-How-to-make-a-very-realistic-fire-explosion-in-Blender-2-5!
The only downside is that I can only get it to work on older versions of blender. Right now I'm using 2.62. I tried it in 2.65, but couldn't find the options I needed.

I have it baking now, if it looks good I'll post a result soon!

More fire

More fire!



Just playing around with a blend file... It looks pretty weird though, I may change the seed and tweak some settings to see what else I can do.