I played a bit around with houdini. The end goal is a loopable fireball which i can put into a flipbook and use for the explosion 
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a new iteration. first main explosion render test from houdini (Red channel: smoke, Green channel: fire mask): the flipbook is stuttering a lot as i slow it down more and more over time.
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Like a “Snow KABOOOM globe” 
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Do you use motion vector to blend frames ?
Super cool idea ! It’s so funny to watch debris smashing on the shield 
thank you! no, the flip is very stuttery right now. i’ll try to make a slower sim and if this isn’t enought i need to use motion vectors. but i think i’ll use slate (optical flow) instead of houdini generated vel vectors as i never got a perfect result with those.
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Hi, I really love this. Do you have a breakdown of how this was created?
Keep up the great work
Zaf
i’m sure i’ll create some kind of breakdown as soon as i’m done (will take a while!) 
thank you for the kind words!
her is an update. new (slower rolling) flipbook (less stuttery) and i tweaked a bit how the smoke stay at the top of the shield:
Feedback
- horinzontal fire blow
- ground dust longer
- inside of bubble milky after explosion
- prime force field just before explosion for better anticipation
- sparkles/dust on fuse while burning
- explosion doesn’t fit. blackpowder makes short flash, then white smoke + strikes of smoke
Todo
[X] check oil/powder explosion
- stronger glow at beginning
[X] add burning oil on the ground + fires
[X] add splashing burning liquid drops (removed again)
[X] add burning shockwave
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Wicked man!
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Small update
- Story Time! The oil puddle shall tell us, that the barrel is filled with oil and not with black powder. This explains, why the explosion doesn’t consist of white dust (black powder) but has this thick black billowy smoke
- Added a horizontal fire blast pronouncing the pushed ground dust direction a bit more
- Added strong burning fires to the ground to make a connection between the location where the barrel was and the raising smoke (before, the barrel was just gone and nothing filled the empty space)
- Added flames which ignite when the black powder fuse fire touches the oil puddle
Feedback/ToDo
- ground dust longer
- inside of bubble milky after explosion
- prime force field just before explosion for better anticipation
- sparkles/dust on fuse while burning
- smoke colliding with shield looks not perfect yet, should role along shield better
- oil flame: blue color first then turning to red
- adjust fire-smoke and explo-smoke color
- more ineratia: https://twitter.com/Piranhi/status/1320838537386860544
- careful with debris: sometimes they roll outside of the field
- normal map/6sided smoke texture
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first test with making a sim+collision in houdini to generate something i can put on the dome when a explosion particle hits the surface:
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a test with the texture generated from my “smoke collides with shield” houdini-simulation. it stutters and has not enough detail/shading but at least it works kind of.
each explosion-particle has two renderers: one sprite renderer for the explosion-sprite and one mesh-renderer using a small cap of a sphere to match the roundness of the shield. depending of the distance of the particle to the shield, i fade-in the mesh particle. with that, the smoke colliding with the shield only appears when the explosion particle is actually near to the shield. this is surely not optimized for games but at least an interesting solution
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You could try scaling the particle down to 0 when the opacity is 0 to reduce overdraw and save a lot of performance, making it at least usable in some game scenarios.
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Did many tests about smoke collisions. Out of this came 4 short tutorial videos about setting up smoke collisions. Here is the first one, you’ll find the other ones in the channel as well.
https://youtu.be/RtmwWhnsWA8
And I used my learned knowledge to make this quick test. Need to render and see how it looks ingame later (it’s just a quick screengrab, not a nice rendering):
https://imgur.com/m7iuRGW.gif
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tiny update. tried my new texture but to be honest … didn’t do too much. there is a but more smoke movement going on now at the shield but … i expected more after yesterdays screen grab somehow all this viewport motion does not translate to the rendering/shader 
first test for a ground decal where the barrel exploded (substance designer):
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I’ve been trying to get nice cracked/shatter decals from Substance designer for ages, but nothing this good.
Really nice!
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I love how this looks!
And a great showcase/breakdown.
I’m by no means an expert on this but I might have some pointers that might make it a bit better. (Just what came up in my mind the moment I saw it.)
- I like how the barrel lights up and moves before the explosion. But it felt a bit slow because of the second squash/stretch. Just one time might make it a bit smoother in the transition. In my eyes it looks like it explodes on the inside and is done, then suddenly a big BOOM.
- Love the shield effect. Only thing I might change is maybe make a kind of trailing light in the blue ring that goes around to suggest it staying on/renewing. Kinda of like a loading screen circle.
Awesome work, love to see more!
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thank you for taking the time to write the feedback <3 i’ll definitelly keep the tipps in mind when i come back to it. but first: decal! yeah
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new version for my explo decal. next step: test in unreal.
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Looks cool, especially with the depth.
But maybe still clean/straight lines for an explosion.
Maybe do a simple warp on top of the whole mask to distort a bit.
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