Below is a project I put together using the toolset:
Instead of simulating and stylizing afterward, everything is authored in VEX on SOP points, so it’s fully scrubbable, needs no caching, and stays easy to art direct. I’ve added staggered multi-origin bursts, faceted chunk trails and thin trails, and an age ramp for shading.
Under the hood, every point carries a normalized life value, agen, that runs from 0 to 1 over its lifetime. Position, motion and shape are all VEX functions of that value, not solved frame to frame, so any frame evaluates on its own and scrubbing never breaks.
For the look, I wanted chunky, faceted shapes that feel drawn instead of simulated. So the trails are stacked faceted chunks and not smooth wisps, and the whole thing can be meshed if I want a solid silhouette. The shading is a toon shader I built in Karma with MaterialX. It uses hard-stepped ramps for the cell band, with rim light calculation, a hard-edged spec glint, AO darkening, and optional crosshatch in the shadows. Every feature has its own on/off so I can keep it as clean or as busy as I want. Then there’s an explosion tab that reads the same age value as the geometry. A stepped temperature ramp takes the burst from white-hot to orange, then red, then dark smoke. A separate fade ramp gives it a quick flash at the start, a settle into the burn, and a fade out at the end.
Leave a Reply