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Depth Charge/Underwater explosion
by Andy Bishop, Darkside Animation 27/05/2005

The key thing with explosions is the timing of one effect over another - in this case we have the initial flash, the expanding fiery explosion and then the effects of water cooling down and imploding. All these things work together turning the fiery initial explosion into the grey smoky effect that tumbles upwards. A depth charge also releases loads of air which bursts upwards through the water trying to escape the pressure of the sea, this again is a separate element. It's these three bits we will cover in this hypervoxels tutorial, but before we start I just want to mention the elements you might want to add to this depth charge explosion.

The bits not included in this tutorial:

  • The depth charge itself needs to be added slowly falling;
  • The debris from the depth charge itself that will expand out rapidly then slowly drift down;
  • Initial air bubble that expands out of the explosion in the opening moments of the explosion.

Lastly, I also want to mention that the settings are arbitrary and based on what I think looks good, which is why there might be odd values. If you want to change them to something that looks better for you, feel free.
User level
 Competent LightWave user.
Tools used
HyperVoxels.
Materials needed
None.
End Results

 

 
Step 1 - Setup

 

Colour the backdrop

There are loads of ways and variations of doing this but for this shot these are my settings. Go to Backdrop and click on Gradient backdrop. Under the following headings put the following colour.

You can also click on the colour swatch at the end of each line and manually choose whatever colours you wish, however the Sky Color and Ground Color should be the same. The darker you make it the deeper it will look, though the lighting on the hypervoxels will need to be altered to make it match.

Set your lighting values and colour

Click on the Lights button (L) at the bottom of LightWave's interface and select Item properties (p). The default light intensity is 100%, this will suit us fine, however the colour does need to change in order to slightly tint our smoke and explosion. So in light color left mouse click on the numeric colour tabs and drag to the following values.

This may seem a little "pastel" in relation to the backdrop colours, but what we are trying to achieve is a subtle tint to our explosion and no more.

 
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