First Null

Add a null (Ctrl n). This null will be our starting point in the explosion and is an initial burst of smoke that will barely be seen but helps dirty up our fire ball which we will add next. Open up Hypervoxels in the Volumetrics and Fog window (Ctrl F6). You will see a greyed out Null under "object name", double click on the Null to highlight and activate it. Towards the top right of the Hypervoxel panel you will see a pop-up menu labelled Object Type, select Volume. In order to see the change call up Viper (F7), you should now see a little smoky ball in the Viper window.

Now we will change the parameters and set some envelopes in order to make the smoky ball start small, get bigger and shrink back again. First we want to adjust the dissolve envelope to fade our Hypervoxel on and off. Click on the E (envelope) button to the right of the word "Dissolve" and input the following settings.

Frame 0 = Value 0% Tension 0
Frame 4 = Value 30% Tension 0
Frame 8 = Value 0% Tension 1
Frame 15 = Value 0% Tension 1
Frame 40 = Value 100% Tension 1

Your curve should end up looking like this:

Close this envelope and on we go. Under the Geometry tab in the HyperVoxels window click on the envelope button next to particle size and put in the following values.

Frame 5 = Value 0m Tension 1
Frame 11 = Value 992mm Tension 0.3
Frame 20 = Value 855mm Tension 0
Frame 30 = Value 0m Tension 1

Your envelope should look like this:

Close the envelope and click on the shading tab, remain in the basic tab area and input the following values:

Move on to the advanced panel whilst still in shading. This panel is divided into 3 areas, render quality — Shadow settings and illumination control. Render and shadow quality will greatly effect the render times so be careful with these settings, I would recommend setting them both to medium, low works fine if your post processing the effect with film grain (this will cover up the fact that they don't look that great).

Illumination should be set to Beer with the use all lights button ticked, I would also put the ambient to 15% but leave the colour at 200 for red, green and blue.

Now move to the hyper texture tab and change the texture to FBM, with a frequency of 3, contrast of 0% and small power of .5.

Now set the texture amplitude to 50% and the texture effect to Billowing. The effect speed should be set to 200%.

Try a small preview using Viper. You should eventually see a preview of some expanding and contracting smoke. It may not look much but it will help our main explosion look really cool Remember to put Viper into Object Preview mode.

Second Null

This null is going to add the noisy explosion part that will give us the main effect for the start of our explosion. Once again double click on the null in the Hypervoxels panel to activate it, we are now ready to start editing its settings.

As on Null (1), change the object type to volume and then adjust the dissolve envelope as follows.

Frame 0 = Value 80% Tension 0
Frame 12 = Value 59% Tension 0.46
Frame 19 = Value 59% Tension 0.46
Frame 50 = Value 100% Tension 1
The curve should look like this:

Close the envelope and now we go to particle size and put in the following values.

Frame 3 = Value 0m Tension 1
Frame 7 = Value 1m Tension 0
Frame 32 = Value 800mm Tension 1

Like so:

Close the envelope and click on the shading tab, remain in the basic tab area and input the following Color values: Red = 249, Green = 217 and Blue = 146 to make a warm yellow.

Click on the T Button (Texture) to the right of the colour swatch. Here we are going to create and adjust a gradient to make the explosion change colour over time. First we need to choose a Gradient layer type.

Make the layer opacity 60% and, choose Particle Age as the input parameter. Set it up as follows:

Bar 1 Red = 250 Green = 202 Blue = 004 - Alpha = 100% - Parameter = 0
Bar 2 Red = 237 Green = 083 Blue = 017 - Alpha = 100% - Parameter = 2.4
Bar 3 Red = 117 Green = 095 Blue = 069 - Alpha = 100% - Parameter = 6.14
Bar 4 Red = 030 Green = 030 Blue = 030 - Alpha = 100% - Parameter = 18.5