Thanks for having a look at my pre-rendered explosion VFX assets for Blender!

I'm a simulations guy by trade, and I know that sometimes you just want to be able to drag and drop something into your scene that's not going to melt your computer; that's why I put this collection together!

Download the Archive [zip file] 

Make sure you've told Blender where to look for Assets: Go to Preferences:

Next, head for 'File Paths'

And pick out a directory that you're going to store your Asset Libraries [if you haven't already]

Next up, we need to un-archive [unzip] the file you downloaded; You'll need to put the contents into the directory you just set up above!

It's a good idea to restart Blender after this step, as it starts up again, it'll re-check the Asset Library folder

Now you can bring up the Asset Browser [shift+F1]:

And in there, you should be able to see your new Explosion VFX assets! you can drag and drop these into your scene!

RETIMING

By default, these assets will detonate on the first frame of your animation; that's obviously not ideal for everyone; what you'll need to do is select the asset once it's inside your scene; and head for the Material Editor:

Where you can change the 'Start Frame' for the animated explosion texture. Note: this material uses three seperate but related animated textures; so you'll need to set the start frame on all three.

Once you're in the material editor you can also tweak other settings, like the intensity of the emissive [fire] parts of the texture, or mix in some darker or lighter colours to the smoke; there's also a normal map included to allow for a little bit of light interaction on the smoke layer; don't go too crazy with it though - a little bit can help a lot, but too much, not great!

In subsequent revisions of my asset libraries I will be making all of these things much easier to tweak and change from a top level; please feel free to drop me some feedback at [email protected], or come find me on socials - @benharkervfx