Explosions are dazzling when they aren't terrifying. I've long wanted a collection of explosions for my own projects since they are the perfect crowd pleaser for a beat drop. I wasn't going for realism here but instead some exciting stylized explosions. In this pack I've created 7 different types of explosions and each explosion has 5 different variants since I was able to change the seed and render it out. Then I also created 2-3 different options of glow treatments. So that explains the 168 different videos in this pack.

I already had some good experience with fluids in Maya having created some nebulae scenes in the past, but I needed a refresher of how to approach it explicitly for explosions. Turns out I was pretty close but this tutorial helped hone my skills. Also I stopped spinning my wheels when I realized that I could just render using Arnold and not need to worry about the difficulties of rendering fluids in Redshift. Then my first renders out of Arnold just didn't feel right and that's when I realized that adding some glow in post was vital to create that super hot feeling.

I made sure that there are no edges visible, meaning that all of the explosions do not leave the frame. So some of the videos are actually 3k or 4k resolution, but I simply extended the resolution so that the glow gradient wouldn't go out of frame. Since each video includes an alpha channel then you can place the video anywhere you want on your canvas. This also allows you to mash them together, which is how I created the "collage" videos in this pack.

I rendered out the videos at half real-time, so that gives you more freedom to change the speed of the explosion while you're performing live. All of the videos featured in the compilation edit above were sped up to 200%, 300%, or 400% just to make them super short and intense to match the music.

I decided to force fade out each video when the explosion is finished and it's just thick smoke left over. In the context of a live performance I find it distracting when a clip just pops off when it's done. Perhaps not the best solution for some people, but I found it to look great in my layering tests within Resolume.

The "Warning Signs" scenes were inspired by seeing a bunch of road signs stacked on the side of the road. So I collected some open-source imagery, cut each one out, retained the alpha, and then sequenced them up in After Effects. I knew that they would be so juicy when injected into NestDrop and I wasn't disappointed with the results.

Released July 2021