Interlopers.net Forum - Half-Life 2 News & Tutorials

Also his explosion particles always feel very contained, there's no whoosh of air. And they are small. And the orange color needs to be much more saturated, and he needs textures that are not just round blobs. The debris is cool though.

Part of it also the way they're structured, the amount of variance is limited and to my eyes I can pick out the individual sprites being animated.
That's not to say it's only your work, I get this in many games.


You should do a timelapse of your workflow.

FWUMP, and not bang. Gif is low res, but shows the thing at 15 fps. initial fireball + expansion all takes place in .2 seconds or less.

As for contained, I can't have smoke going 3,000 mph across the map. Else the sprites would get away from the "cluster" and look fake and out of place. So they have to be contained to a certain size else it just looks unrealistic at the most. This is for a grenade launcher explosion, so its not gonna be monstrous like the planes crashing into the twin towers.

With textures in particles, the more of a round shape they have, the less chance some one has to spot that the texture is repeating, if there is an odd edge sticking off the eye can easily pick it up and match that all the textures are repeating. So its easier that way, every developer makes their particles round for the most part, I use UV distortion on mine to add waviness to them in game.

As for structure and the amount of variance.. well there isn't much you can do for that. Particles just say give me a max X Y and Z. And that's as far as you can go with it. The computer then chooses random numbers between the max and min.


The only thing you really have to control it:


To counter variance problems, you can often make a sprite sheet to choose between random sprites, but even then you could pick out the ones that are the same. Thats just how it is.

I personally think that already looks like a huge improvement. Damn lad, you're good at this.

Thanks, I mean this is the first bit of critting i've ever got from any one ever on my particles. And I'm glad you guys finally brought it up. Else im just chugging through it without guidance.

Eventually i'll learn to bake animations from pre-rendered stuff to make even better effects. But I don't have the knowledge yet.

That is sooo much better. I think it could be a tiny bit more contained at the bottom though, more of a spike effect.

1080p would best show the smoke detail. I removed the white sphere debris just to get them out the way. I could add like a warp and what not on the initial explosion as well. Smoke lasts 5 seconds, but i just keep restarting the animation to show the initial blast.

Doesn't have the same effect as the gif, orange flashes way too fast and is just instantly full, it needs like three frames to get to max fullness. And the smoke doesn't stay as long.

Excellent improvement!

Janga that grenade particle looks good, but it looks like it contracts when the flame particles disappear and the smoke particles don't. In an explosion the flame is matter being burnt and the smoke is the resulting carbon particles floating in the air. So really you would need the flame particle to rapidly change colour to grey to emulate this. I guess you could use a curve to define the speed, starting at max and then rapidly changing to low speed to emulate the transfer of force. You have the colouration pretty much spot on though. Also you'll notice in source splosions that they have a split second of bright lines at the very beginning of the explosions. This is particulate matter in the ground and shrapnel in the grenade catching alight or superheating on ignition and flying out of the center of the blast. They cool very quickly so you only see the slightest flash, but it adds realism. Your shrapnel particles are good for poetic license in any case.

Source: I've thrown grenades and seen the splosions (from behind glass)

Also check out the grenade splosions in double action boogaloo, they are not as nice as the one you have there, but maybe some food for thought.

EDIT: After watching that video, completely disregard the above. Damn that looks good.

The video seems slightly sped up for some reason. Don't know why. Just play our game when it comes out and tell me what you think then. But I can't please every one to their tastes. And the smoke actually goes from bright orangeish to the grey color.

None the less, thanks for the feed back, and i guess just enjoy my serious stuff when it comes out in mist of stagnations alpha/beta.

Highlight to read:

Oh and do note that i've seen explosions in real life, as at one point i was stupid and made pipe bombs many years ago. Biggest mistake ever.

Biggest mistake ever.

I can safely say I have the exact opposite attitude towards my pipebomb days. Shit was awesome.

Highlight to read:

BOOM! NO MORE LETTERBOX MR LOUD AND AGGRESSIVE GERMAN SHEPHERD THAT BIT MY ASS!

My contribution to you guys.

Jangalow-umph

I give you some of my latest creations!



Also, I know the flowing lava is total shit.

And heres the some of the actual shader i made that i use, the one in the lava video is a bit modified.



UE4