“Mystical Explosion”. Art by Rodolfo Rodríguez, CG Artist & Animator.
Hi guys!
In this tutorial we will see how to recreate this cool VFX work, called “Mystical Explosion”, using TurboSplines 3dsMax plugin.
Although this kind of special FX (light trails and light rays) are usually made with 3D particles, VXF plugins or directly in postproduction, the power and versatility of TurboSplines allows you to easily create them as 3D meshes, so you can have a fast realtime representation of the whole thing and control every aspect of the final shape. Let’s start.
First, we need to create the nucleus. It’s like a magical gem about to explode.
Create a geosphere. Then add an EditPoly modifier and extrude all its faces a bit outwards to make it look like it’s cracking because of the internal pressure.
To make the paths for the light trails, you can use circular shapes and place them like orbits around the nucleus. Another way is to make a torus knot object (Control Panel > Extended Primitives) and extract one of its edge loops to use just a single spline as the path. But the better and easier way to get a cool path for this, is using Spiros plugin. It’s as simple as creating any primitive shape in 3dsmax. The one in this tutorial was made with that plugin. Look at the image below.
Now open TurboSplines. At the Creation section, load the path/s and create 5 or 6 cylinders along the path/s to make the light trails. Use the extra feature Taper to make the trails look more dynamic and appealing.
To make the bigger end of the cylinders look smoother, change the basic geometry of the meshes from cylinder to capsule (with rounded end). Go to Creation > Mesh Type and select Capsule. Then press ‘(Re)Buil Geometry’.
Adjust the meshes’ radius, segments and height at the Edition section.
Once you are happy with shape of the light trails, hide them to start making the radial light rays coming out of the nucleus.
For this example, instead of using a post-render effect, we will build the light rays as 3D geometry (for the same reason we did that with the light trails).
Although there are other methods to create objects like spikes on the surface of another object, we recommend you to try this great free plugin called Vertices to Splines.
Download the script and do the following.
Make a copy of the geosphere, scale it down a bit and delete the EditPoly modifier. This way you can use its vertices as starting points for the radial light rays.
Using the script and the second geosphere, generate the radial splines with some length variation to make like the bright of a star. See the image below.
Then use TurboSplines again (cylinders with taper) to quickly create like spikes, emerging from the geosphere. Delete this second sphere.
Unhide the light trails meshes and check the general shape and volume of the final model. Make the necessary adjustments.
Create a camera and set a nice view for the final composition.
Assign some nice materials for the light trails, the nucleus and the radial light rays.
Render the image, with all the channels you need to have enough freedom for compositing (diffuse, reflection, z-depth, transparency, etc.)
Finally, in your favorite image-editing or post-production software, retouch the image/s, add glows, smoke, bright and additional effects to your final render.
That’s all! I hope you liked this tutorial. If you have any doubts or consultations, please post them down here on the comments section or write us through this Contact form.
Cheers! 🙂
