High Speed Paint Ball Explosion

[Synthetik]

This is a cool photo by Alan Sailer on Flickr. I love the look of it. It got me thinking that maybe you could create artificial version of this sort of thing in Studio Artist using displacement warping effects. So you start with a photo of an object and then introduce a series of displacement mapping transformations to simulate blowing it apart.

[Dennis Miller]

John - did you build any nice presets to try this? Any further thoughts?
d.

[Synthetik]

There's some time particle presets that blow apart an image. The don't have the look of this particular effect, they look more like pieces of the image scattering off.

I posted some variations of this kind of idea recently on my blog where the processing is done with a source movie rather than a static source image.

One thought would be to build a recursive process where you displace using a polar function centered in the center of the balloon. You'd want some random variations in the polar displacement field. And you'd be recursively processing the image over and over again to blow it apart.

[Synthetik]

Here's the other time particle image i posted here that's the same idea with the time particles tracking the original source positioning for what they display while they move around on the screen. Again, neither of these are the specific effect you are looking for but are examples of tracking the original source positioning for source display in a moving time particle.

[Dennis Miller]

Hi JOhn.
"time particle presets..."
would these be in the 3.5 defaults? or if not, do you happen to know where?
d.

[Synthetik]

There's also a time particle PASeq category to look at. The key to tracking the original source positions for time particles is to use the Time Particle Start Point Tracking option in the Paint Source Offset control panel.