UDK - Prometheus Explosion

Hey everybody! I’m new here and I’m excited to finally find a place where I can meet other VFX artists! I’ve been doing hobby fx work for mods and such for a long time, and just recently I got an internship at Airtight Games, where I’ve been learning Cascade.

I decided as a little learning experiment to try to recreate the explosion at the end of the movie Prometheus within UDK.

//youtu.be/dlpfxaXx5d8

It was a bit difficult since there were no full videos of the scene that I could find, was using these a


Wasn’t too satisfied with the main body of smoke though, I’ll probably revisit it.

Fairly well done. A few things tho:

  • Add some context because effects are seldom made to stand all by themselves. Blow
    something up, even if that’s just disc with a greeble texture. Try to tell a story in this
    ~20 seconds, something simple like “Space disc flies, it’s on fire, blows up.”

Even better if you play with timing to increase the impact of the event. For example:
“Camera is looking up to the sky. Disc enters the screen from the left, leaves a smoke
trail. Smaller fires are visible here and there then a smaller explosion occurs. Disc’s
trajectory changes, tilts a bit, now heading toward the ground and the camera. More,
bigger fires pop up then BAMM! Debris fall onto the camera, fade out.”
Dunno, just something, usually it’s well worth the additional effort as the result is more
then the sum of it’s parts.

  • To me it always looks so “videogame-ish” when an explosion leaves absolutely nothing
    behind. Add some bigger, long living, smoking and/or burning debris, if constraints allow it.

  • The big filler smoke puffs could use a distorting shader to add a secondary motion to the
    texture and hide the revolving particle nature a bit.

But yeah, it’s quite close to the target.

[QUOTE=Zoltan;22040]Fairly well done. A few things tho:

  • Add some context because effects are seldom made to stand all by themselves. Blow
    something up, even if that’s just disc with a greeble texture. Try to tell a story in this
    ~20 seconds, something simple like “Space disc flies, it’s on fire, blows up.”

Even better if you play with timing to increase the impact of the event. For example:
“Camera is looking up to the sky. Disc enters the screen from the left, leaves a smoke
trail. Smaller fires are visible here and there then a smaller explosion occurs. Disc’s
trajectory changes, tilts a bit, now heading toward the ground and the camera. More,
bigger fires pop up then BAMM! Debris fall onto the camera, fade out.”
Dunno, just something, usually it’s well worth the additional effort as the result is more
then the sum of it’s parts.

  • To me it always looks so “videogame-ish” when an explosion leaves absolutely nothing
    behind. Add some bigger, long living, smoking and/or burning debris, if constraints allow it.

  • The big filler smoke puffs could use a distorting shader to add a secondary motion to the
    texture and hide the revolving particle nature a bit.

But yeah, it’s quite close to the target.[/QUOTE]

Yea I definitely want to try adding some context to it. I’m still fairly new to UDK so I still need to learn how to set up cameras, envs, animations, etc.

Thanks for the reply!