ExplosiaFX

The ExplosiaFX object (EFX) is used for the simulation of smoke and fire, Note that the FLIP Domain object originally used for this purpose is now used only for FLP/APIC fluid simulation.

There are quite a lot of settings in ExplosiaFX so to avoid a very long page and difficult-to-find details, we have split the reference manual for the EFX object into several pages. These are:

In addition there are two tags for user with Explosia:

ExplosiaFX includes standard falloff support when used with particle sources. These are the same falloffs as in other X-Particles and Cinema 4D objects.

How to use ExplosiaFX

Despite its complex appearance, using ExplosiaFX is very simple. You need:

  1. an ExplosiaFX solver object
  2. a source object (i.e. something to burn), which must be located inside the solver boundary
  3. and an ExplosiaFX Source tag on the source object

That's it. A typical setup might look like this in the object manager, where the Sphere is the source object:

Which with just the default settings would produce this kind of animation in the editor:

Use of deformers

ExplosiaFX now supports the use of deformers to affect the simulation. Simply make the deformer a child of the xpExplosiaFX object in the usual way.

Rendering the result

You can render the simulation with the X-Particles Gaseous material, but for best and fastest results we recommend using Cycles 4D.

You can also render Explosia simulations in other render engines if you export the simulation as OpenVDB volumes and the render engine you choose can import such volumes. Octane and Redshift can both do so.

For how to create an OpenVDB volume from Explosia please see the OpenVDB mesher page. Exporting the volumes is done using the Cache object and there is a separate page on how to do this in this manual.