LogInNello Fontani showcased a couple of Akira/Evangelion-style explosion FX and shared some insights on how they were made.
Today, let's take a closer look at the fantastic stylized explosion effects, showcased over the past several days by Nello Fontani, an experienced 3D Generalist and Concept Artist who previously wowed us with his realistic 3D model of a Napoleonic-era warship.
According to Nello, these VFX were inspired by anime classics, such as Akira and Neon Genesis Evangelion, with the project's goal being to create flipbook textures for game engines that embody an anime/cartoon style without having to draw them frame by frame. To achieve this, the artist chose JangaFX's EmberGen, a volumetric fluid simulation tool designed for simulating, rendering, and exporting flipbooks, image sequences, and VDB volumes.
Jason Key, a renowned VFX Artist and an EmberGen guru in his own right, spoke with Nello about the project, offering insights on how to achieve a stylized look in JangaFX's flagship software.
As Nello explained to Jason, when setting up NPR explosions in EmberGen, it's essential to keep shapes simple, even for large explosions, meaning the voxel size would be quite large. Forces like noise or vorticles should also be large but not too strong to avoid noise in the main silhouette. Colors should be vibrant, using gradients, contrast, and remapping density to create well-defined shapes of fire and smoke.
The artist also revealed that adjusting the scene style tab to use "colored thin strokes" with low quantization settings helps reduce the shades in the color palette. Strong scene AO and emissive masking further help define the shapes, while using volume post-processing with high smoke dilate value helps to fill in smaller smoke details, resulting in a more solid shape.
"I've always been fascinated by anime explosions. Great classics like Akira or Evangelion and many others show some great examples of explosions where the dynamic of smoke and fire is quite well represented even if the shapes are stylized and more simple compared to a similar size real fluid movement," Nello explained. "I couldn't find flipbook explosion textures with the style I need, something that is not realistic but detailed, so I thought to investigate the possibility of creating some assets in EmberGen, which has great results with realistic fire and smoke, but I never come across stylized look scenes."
You can check out more of Nello's projects here and try out JangaFX's EmberGen yourself over here. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.