Hi all,

I've just started digging into texture, model, & animation modding for EECH. I would really like to try updating the weapon graphical effects to some kind of realism. I'm talking mostly about explosions, smoke, fire. Right now they are pretty but don't look much like real life at all. I hope we can change that.

Please participate by replying with links to video if you would. Thanks!!

To start, I'm looking for various helicopter weapons hitting targets & the resulting explosions/fires (not just launching):
-Hellfires
-M230 chain gun (Apache)
-Hydra 70mm rockets
-Vikrs
-20mm gatling gun
-etc.


Links with full color video are ideal. Combat or training footage is fine but avoid FLIR gun camera footage--it is abundant but not very useful.

-Olds

Not really what you asked for, but I think the explosions in Rise of Flight look very real, so they could provide some inspiration:

These are artillery, but I don't think a missile hit wouldn't look all that different. At least much more like this than the "Hollywood" huge fireball explosions we're used to.

Rise of Flight easily has some of the best graphics/explosions I've ever seen in a sim. I definitely concur they look more realistic than most for explosions.

Actually, that's useful too--I am looking at game reference for construction ideas so that's great, thx! BF3 has some nice FX too (how they're built anyway, not necessarily the realism).
-Olds

Some more reference:
30mm chain gun


30mm vs. car


30mm firing - notice small muzzle flash, mostly smoke

Sorry to intrude, I don't normally post here but I just saw this thread and it looked of interest. One thing I will say to anyone looking to make modded explosions (I didn't even know you were getting that into it), is that certain ammuniton/missiles create different types of explosions of different types of surface/target.

I was always impressed with Jane's Longbow 2 for this, as when you shoot at the ground with the chaingun the impacts just look like little explosions. But when you hit armor, you also get a visible fragmentation effect. It's logic really, if a weapon hits the ground it goes into the dirt and muffles most of the explosion effect, where if you hit something hard, and for the most part impregnable, a lot of the explosion can be seen on the 'surface'.

I thought I had a close-up video I took in LB2 already at YouTube to give you an example, but it appears that I don't, sorry.

Flyboy, I may have been wrong about that. As I run more tests on the spriteFX I see that there may be at least a bit of object differentiation in the game code. Cool!

Just some videos which might can help you

http://youtu.be/aU1ukWWOFqg?t=9s

http://youtu.be/YV7sGquXxAo

http://youtu.be/QUMxZ34Ptco

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2zx502RHCA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHPVDRXKGfc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-FzIsg9Qwo

I hope these videos help you

I tried to record a video in LB2 of the impact effects that I was talking about, but the sim plays up nowadays and won't let Fraps work on my PC when it is running. I also tried to take some screenshots but that didn't work either.

I did, however, find ONE shot that I had taken previously which shows, to some extent, what I was talking about. Sorry it is just a single picture, and there's no motion to the animations to give you a better idea.



Longbow 2 30mm chaingun impacts - on the left is a 'hit' on the armor, on the right is a 'miss' on the ground just beside target.

As you can see, there are two different impact effects for the 30mm, at least, depending on if the ground is hit or the armor is hit.