shiitake
A tutorial for Hash A:M 8.5p++ and above by Ilya Anisimoff aka weevil
Questions and comments here
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click to download the mushroom cloud animation 4 seconds, 352x288 @ 25fps, 811k |
click to download the entire shiitake ident 30 seconds, 352x288 @ 25fps, 5198k |
Introduction
After deciding that I wanted to animate a mushroom cloud I had the difficult task of working out how the heck I was going to do it. At first it seemed like a pretty straight forward task but the difficulties soon presented themselves. Initially I toyed with the idea of using particles, after all a mushroom cloud is made up of dust particles, but after a little consideration and experimentation I concluded that it was possible but it would take a very, very long time. So now that I had chosen to use spline-patch surfaces I had to work out how I was going to get the curling clouds of smoke look. There was of course only one option: animated displacement maps. Already I had a bevy of problems to solve. To start off with, displacement mapping needs alot of polygons to look smooth. This is generally not a problem as most people only need to use displacement maps for terrain/bodies of water, but if it's a surface you want to animate, then that's a different story. Each spline patch will only subdivide into 16 quad polys so you need a high density mesh for it to render smoothly, and when you do have a mesh that's dense enough to render smoothly you've probably got more points than you want to push around frame by frame. Next, I had to work out how I was actually going to make the animated displacement maps - not really something you want to paint by hand in Photoshop. And I still had to work out how I was going to map the darn thing. Hopefully this tutorial and subsequent parts will walk you through all the problems and how they can be solved.
I've broken down the tutorial into 4 parts, each part has the project file for that section of the tutorial available for download at the bottom of the page
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Part 1: Constraint Systems & Surface Animation
Part 2: Generating Animated Displacement Maps
Update March 15, 2k2
I just stumbled onto this link quite accidently, it's a video archive of US Nuke tests from 1945-70. I haven't had the opportunity to look at any of the clips myself yet (hey, I've only got a 28.8k connection so gimme a break! :) ) but I'm sure it would excellent reference footage for anyone attempting to animate a realistic looking nuke explosion.
Historical Nuclear Weapons Test Films
A special thanks to Hash.com for making such excellent animation software and for hosting this site
Copyright © 2001 by Ilya Anisimoff. All rights reserved.