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HerrTom's explosions


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So I've been playing around with the explosion graphics in CM - I've enjoyed the ones from the various mods, but it always bothered me how huge and cartoony they looked.  So I set about making an explosion inspired by Project Reality and Squad:

maxresdefault.jpg

And ended up with this:

XCUAZNM.png

DxKiB7C.png

I'm in no way completely satisfied with what I have, but I'm lazy and was wondering what you guys thought - good direction to head in?

You can download it here: Google Drive

Extract into the Mods folder in My Documents, or the Z folder in the game directory

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LOL, probably. We had an icon for download that was using the discrete icon commonly used for save (we viewed the action as a save). People were confused. Partly because they didn't view it as a save action and partly because they didn't understand what the icon meant. 

Yes, I realize there are issues with our user experience not being clear but also there are people who have never used a diskette in the work force now.

Fun times

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I never looked at Google Drive's interface from your guys' end.  It's handy for storing files, but man, do they make it difficult figuring out how to save files from it!  It took me a couple of minutes and clicking around to find the button haha.

I played around with a different source for the explosion, and I've managed to get a pretty good process going in Photoshop to automate the generation of the frames. But the big struggle is still with how Combat Mission does "particles".

0vGVAI2.png

This explosion looks great... when it lines up properly - everything is rotated randomly and sometimes there really isn't *any* explosion.  It also looks odd for airbursts.  Very odd.

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Ask and you shall receive... sort of.  I was unsatisfied with the size of 82mm mortar and autocannon shell explosions... so I doubled the size of the explosions.  I may have hit a good middle ground, I think - fairly satisfied with how it looks in most cases - except when you get an ammo explosion - that still looks odd.

NuBISWb.png

Link to download double size 2x (version 5 plus!) explosions: Google Drive

 

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  • 5 months later...

The vehicle penetration explosion is down right brilliant and immersive as hell. The ground explosions look great too. The one problem is when things get big and boomy. The texture expands and looks like gray burlap. If you zoom in on your bmp files you can see the banding in them. It must get exaggerated with the increase in size.

 

Boom.jpg

 

If or how you could remedy the banding I can't say. But if you could it would be a damn cool mod (though the huge explosions lack some fire). It is too bad we don't have different types of explosions because as I said up top when this hits a vehicle it looks great.

 

Here's a vid. You can really see the weirdness on the third and fourth boom booms.

 

 

Mord.

 

 

 

Edited by Mord
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1 hour ago, Mord said:

The vehicle penetration explosion is down right brilliant and immersive as hell. The ground explosions look great too. The one problem is when things get big and boomy. The texture expands and looks like gray burlap. If you zoom in on your bmp files you can see the banding in them. It must get exaggerated with the increase in size.

That's definitely true, not sure how much I can do about it.  I have a bunch of explosion animations that I've collected on my computer, many of which I've drawn myself (don't ask me why - I'm not sure myself) and this one ended up looking the best.  This one was collected from some video which probably reduced its quality.

1 hour ago, Mord said:

Here's a vid. You can really see the weirdness on the third and fourth boom booms.

Nice boom booms, I dig.  What I really want to do, and may be inspired to do, is take the explosion animation all the way to the smoke bitmap, so that it's perhaps more seamless?

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On 10/29/2017 at 8:58 PM, HerrTom said:

That's definitely true, not sure how much I can do about it.  I have a bunch of explosion animations that I've collected on my computer, many of which I've drawn myself (don't ask me why - I'm not sure myself) and this one ended up looking the best.  This one was collected from some video which probably reduced its quality.

I can tell you why...because modding is an OCD that grabs you and won't let go and no matter how hard you try you'll keep wanting to perfect whatever it is you are doing. LOL. Your particular disorder happens to center around "explosions".

 

On 10/29/2017 at 8:58 PM, HerrTom said:

Nice boom booms, I dig.  What I really want to do, and may be inspired to do, is take the explosion animation all the way to the smoke bitmap, so that it's perhaps more seamless

I wouldn't know, I have never messed with fire or smoke, the stuff I like to think of as the ethereal areas of CM modding. Vein would be a brain to pick on that one.

 

Mord.

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I've been playing around with Blender recently and got the idea of generating an explosion animation with far greater fidelity than I would ever dream of doing by hand...

Does anyone know if there's a cap to how many frames an animation in CM may have?  Is the explosion animation limited to say 30 frames, or can I have it last 50? 100?

What I have so far, which is far from satisfactory:

4noQHDl.png

JNrHbWb.png

IA6McB7.png

Needs more yellow or glow and I think the smoke is too thick.  More tomorrow.

klhOVPL.png

Edited by HerrTom
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@HerrTom

I took a bunch of explosion bmps and combined them as a test, the other day, just to see what they looked like. I added in 36 and as far as I could tell they all showed up. To really test it, make say 50 animations, and add a big neon green or purple opaque cloud at the end, something large enough to stand out (like BMP 026 recolored and renumbered would do). Set up an explosion and look for the color at the end. You can keep going until you find a limit, or are satisfied with the amount you need, just keep renaming the neo bmp as the last in the sequence.

I like the color BTW. Keep a set like that before you throw too much yellow in.

 

Mord.

Edited by Mord
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