Explosion and Title Screen

I decided to change up my storyboard slightly for this scene. Not only does the hanger explode but a peice of sindged metal flies at the camera which displays the words '007' and 'Octopussy'. I wanted some kind of pause in the trailer between the initial sequence and the random scenes which come afterwards.

I should also mention that I plan to have the train scene come before the car scene simply becuase I feel it works better in that order.

Here is the rendered video of the explosion I created for this part of the trailer.

The effect is created using the PArray particle system which converts an already present object into smaller peices and explodes them out. This only makes them explode out in a definitive direction however so I also used the PBomb tool to cause the particles to explode out more realistically. 

I planned to use Reactor here to simulate the gravity effect on the exploded particles but it seems that it is next to impossible to use the system on particles.

Attempting to convert the particles into objects would mean they would lose their momentum and move unnaturally as well.

In the end to make up for the lack of Reactor I linked the Gravity tool from the forces tab to the PArray to cause them to fall and also added a UDynaflect tool from the deflecters tab to prevent the particles from falling through the ground.

The explosion itself was created using the SphereGizmo which is under the Atmospheric Apparatus from the Helpers tab. A fire effect with explosion checked and some modifying gave me a fairly decent result.

I'm quite happy with the result despite not being able to use Reactor. The idea for the titles to show up like it did came to me as I was creating this scene where a peice of the hanger flew at the camera when I was testing. I thought it looked really good and decided to use that for showing the title sequence.

I made the texure with the text on it in Photoshop and used UVW Mapping to get it to show in the right way.