Explosioooooooooooon!

I mentioned in a previous post that I would do a little breakdown of the explosion I had to work on in the animation so here it is. 

Rendering out the explosion was actually quite simple because all that needed to be done is to render out one of the city platforms and then that would be composited into the whole shot.

The first explosion was done using the modifier PBomb in Max. I set the target as the roof and animated the explosion. This is by far the easiest method, however it is not a very good one because it just breaks the polygons into pieces instead of performing voronoi fractures

The easiest solution to the above problem would be to use the fracture voronoi script and break the roof up before 'detonating' it. This is what I have done below. The impact point was broken into very small pieces. Then I added a mid section which would have larger pieces falling off. Lastly I added in the bottom of the roof where some chunks of it might fracture but not necessarily fly off. Below is the result

 I thought that instead of using just the voronoi result I would combine the two. Below is what the finished shot looks like:

Elektra put a lot more work into the clouds and Tiago Faria composited the smoke into the shot. We were all quite pleased with the end result.