Create Simple Explosion VFX in Blender Mantaflow - Iridesium

Soon you will be working on the next massive blockbuster and you will need to prove to the studio that Blender can make good explosions!
In this tutorial, we will be going over Blender's new smoke solver. Looking at the pros and cons and learning how to make a simple but effective explosion in Blender.

The problem I pointed out with the adaptive domain setting has been fixed. Go ahead and set the value lower if you are getting clipping.

 

0:00 - Epic Intro
0:43 - Main Particle Emitter
2:09 - Secondary Emitters
3:55 - Adding the Smoke
5:02 - Domain Settings
7:11 - Emitter Settings
10:18 - Smoke Collision
12:20 - Final Simulation
13:28 - Scene Setup
15:02 - Explosion Shader
19:19 - Render Settings
20:44 - Final Renders

[luanespedito]

if i try to render this on my pc i don't even need to simulate the explosion

[marexexe]

For the people that have problems with finding "Bake Data", Go to the Smoke domain > Physics tab > Cache > Type: -, And the type should be Modular, Default you have "Replay" on

[Raddius]

For anyone who can't find "color mapping, " it's because you're on a newer version and it's just renamed to "grid display" it should show up under "viewport" display just like in the video.

[letherg]

0:45"and then delete everything, it's all useless"
*uninstalls blender and starts career as baker*

[absentzz]

"Usually I use 150 to 200, but for this tutorial I'm gonna leave it at 100."

*changes the value to 150*

[dommafia]

I don't know why but at 6:28 when he says hes going to leave that setting at 100 and then right away enters 150 instead, I had a nice chuckle lol

[technicolourmyles]

I would LOVE a good mantaflow fire tutorial. There's barely any content out there for mantaflow fire, and what is actually available is very very simple and not very photorealistic at all. The few renders you showed at the end look incredible and I would love to see a tutorial for those!

[R-Tex.]

For anyone having trouble with the smoke not showing in the rendered view.
Select your domain and go to cache and select 'All' instead of 'Modular' or 'Replay', then 'bake all'.

[Dynamo]

2:25 Help!! My cube is in ancient greek, what do I do now?

[ayushmansingh]

For those people who are struggling with the smoke sim not being same as in the video, i finally figured it out after a lot of hardwork, you need to select all the three emitters when you make the domain by the following steps

Select all three emitters
Object--) quick effects --) smoke effect

[PySnek]

The Color Mapping is new called Grid Display

[Wamgine]

"smoke" is now called "gas" on updated versions fyi

[I_hughjo]

for the people that cant find color map. It changed to grid display after 1.9 update

[RaffoVFX]

Holy Jesus, I was making your nuclear blast tutorial Yesterday and now here it Is a new tutorial! Man, bruh, you make me so Happy! And all of us addicted to 3dexplosions/pyromaniacs are looking Just for stuff like this!!

[gordonbrinkmann]

Great tutorial! I'm still experimenting with Mantaflow to get cool looking explosions, but since I'm a little impatient I never get to bake real high resolution explosions, so they are always lacking in detail. One thing I noticed which I see a lot in smoke / explosion tutorials: you have a lot of flickering shadow artefacts in your rendered animations. Many people suggest using cubic interpolation in the material (which you already did) or not using Adaptive Domain to get rid of it. But that's useless. The main reason for the flickering shadows are bounce values set too low in Transmission and Transparent light paths. Yours are set to 8 and 12, I usually set mine to 64 or 128 (and Total to 128 of course) while leaving the others low. I didn't even notice an increase in render times, it just removes the flickering. By the way, this also helps with glass materials which I always thought are too dark, too shadowy.

[caseuim]

Him: so press quick smoke
My poor laptop: so ya want smoke, ey?

[nf_felix]

Could you maybe make a tutorial, where you show, how to simulate and shade the fire simulations. Cause they look really cool and realistic

[liambuffat]

I learned a ton of stuff from this tutorial. Usually I complain because tutorials are too slow, you don't have that problem. I will have to listen a few times to catch everything. Anyway thumbs up all the way.

[CatalinPascaru]

"This is a simple explosion, not an advanced one"... Jeeeezus....
Anyway, the video is simply amazing! A lot of details, clearly explained, the end result is incredible...
I really appreciate how much effort you are putting into these <3

[gordonbrinkmann]

Some final suggestions: the final material setup you show towards the end has three attribute nodes with the name "density" in it. You could use one attribute node to plug into all three color ramps. And since the density is represented as values ranging from 0 to 1, the color is only black to white - so you could use the factor output of the attribute node instead of the color output. I don't know if there are differences in precision between the color and the factor output, but I'd prefer factor to be on the safe side.
And at first you used the Volume Info node instead of Attribute, if you give a reason why you changed it I might have missed it. The thing is, I experienced a small decrease of render time when using the density output of the Volume Info node instead of the Attribute node. It's just subtle, but of course it adds up when rendering animations.
The color output of the Volume Info node you use at first is quite useless when plugged into a color ramp... because it just gives the color that's set in the "Smoke Color" settings of the flow object. Being a single color and not a color range, the color ramp just calculates a grey value from it and uses that single color to determine its output color. However - if you have multiple flow objects in your domain and give them different smoke colors, the color output of the Volume Info let's you put different smoke colors on different flow objects inside one domain material.