Can anyone help me on my hunt to find a comic style explosion?
I found some stuff here on footagecrate but I am not loving the selection. It needs to feel large in scale. Like I just blew up a petrol station.
Thanks in advance
As a quick and dirty try, you could take your explosion element and run it through Kuruhawa or whatever it’s called.
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maybe find a real explosion and pass it through Sapphire cartoon.
Here’s a clip I found on stock and ran it through sapphire cartoon
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There is something quite unique about hand drawn FX.
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I entered an animation into a competition about a decade ago where you had 2 weeks to produce 30 seconds of animation. There were 3 rounds so the end animated short would be 90 seconds duration. I crazily did it all inside of Flame. I didn’t have time to draw everything up so I ‘cheated’ and used a combination of a few cartoon plugins on stills that I then touched up in paint. However, when it came to explosions and smoke, that approach just didn’t look right so I hand drew them myself. I’m not an artist (I don’t like referring myself as a Flame Artist even) and I can’t draw particularly well, but I was surprised at how well my explosions worked. It would all depend on the style of course but as I was trying to limit colours, I just roughly drew red blobs with smaller orange blobs inside them with smaller yellow blobs inside them. Then some black squiggly lines. I did a bit of one twoing so that they were all roughly evolving from frame to frame without looking too different (fire and explosions are forgiving for this type of thing). It suited the style of animation I was going for though. If you are after a more manga style explosion then I wonder if you could achieve it by using particles, keeping the colour palette limited then adding some edges to make it feel more drawn?
Here is a link to what I did. It’s not brilliant but I was satisfied with what I achieved in very short timeframe doing all the work myself.
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Was looking at getting some stock cartoon fx from this company just last week. They had a sale on and the price looked really good.
Still haven’t bought any yet, but they look pretty good
I think Comixa is the product with explosions.
Alternatively if you have Cinema 4d, you can create your own using the Toon shader. I watched a series of tutorials (on cineversity.com)a whileback showing how to produce exactly that look.
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I was going to attempt this with particles, but stopped after your comment about hand-drawn effects having that unique touch. Your initial example is something like it as well… Maybe I should try my hand at it…
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Even though I have no skill in this area, I’d hand draw it. I love a good hand animated explosion and have always wanted an excuse to get decent at it.
There may be animators you can hire. Guessing most of them are in Japan and Korea.
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We found a couple of stock elements.Thanks for all of the suggestions.
You have to stay to the end to see the big explosion.
It’ll go down very well on TikTok apparently
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