Matthew Benson
Technical Director
Grenade Explosion
Introduction
Most of my day is spent doing long simulations that take quite a while to simulate, and then even longer to get a render back. I wanted to try my hand at some real time work. This Grenade Exploration is the first of 4 projects that I have planned to explore real time graphics.
Environment
I constructed the environment from mostly Quixel and KitBash3d assets. I the lit the scene and got the camera animation in place using Unreal’s Sequencer editor.
FX
Main Explosion
To challenge myself, I wanted to explore all new programs and avoid things I was familiar with as much as possible. So I opted for EmberGen instead of Houdini to generate the primary explosion. EmberGen is a GPU based fluid solver, and allows for real time manipulation of the physics of your scene. Additionally, it allows for very easy generation of the flip books that can be imported into UE4. For my simulation, I opted for a more realistic and less Hollywood look. Hollywood grenades tend to have lots of fire and are quite a bit larger than their real-life counterparts.
FX
Additional Layers
Back in UE4 I began to construct my Niagara setup. It consists of several layers of cards and mesh particles that make up the debris thrown out by the explosion
FX
Grounding in the World
The final step was to ground the effect in the world by adding some physics to a few of the smaller objects and attaching a radial force object to the blueprint controlling the explosion.