Nuclear Explosions and Mushroom Clouds

Hi Guys,

Whats Up!

So far this week I have been working on a Personal Project of making a CG Mushroom Cloud and then putting it into some Live Action footage.

I started by watching a lot of other peoples attempts at nukes on Vimeo/YouTube and to be honest there's more bad than good! I also watched a lot of nuke videos on YouTube.

 I wanted to leave the Dust Wave out for now and just focus on the mushroom cloud. My first attempt went pretty well and was well revived on Vimeo. I used a Fume FX Grid Using about 4GB of Ram and the particles were been emitted of a Tours and then deleted after 4 frames. I did not adjust the time-scale as to save sim'n like 400 frames I could just re-time it in Twixtor in After Effects. This was the result, A little to fast.

Also I did a Second Sim the next day  and it looks a lot better, it still has some problems though!

Next I did a second sim at around the same resolution this time I integrated it into some Live Action Footage I shot on my Canon 550D, At Captain Cooks Monument (A Local National Park, Its very nice!) I did a 2.5D Track of the footage in After Effects and then added my Sim render into the footage, I added Glows and altered the Hue's and Saturations as well as the Levels and The Curves. I then Added a Grade On top for a more nuclear look and also a Overexposed Glow for the Blinding Flash.

Here's the Final Shot:

I hope to revisit this Nuke project in a bit and add a lot more detail and realism like a shock wave, Dust Cloud/ Shockwave maybe some Smoke Tendrils and also Environment Destruction.

Thanks For Viewing My Blog,

Niall