Quickly checked out an explosion/vfx from Starwars Battlefront II and wanted to share the gained knowledge (twitter thread). I think the main explosion consists of several loopable flipbooks.
#realtimevfx #gamedev

Almost all vfx textures are on 1 huge atlas (12288x8192px, DDS = 96MB). Most flipbooks are loopable. Some are unique: They show smoke/fire building up and then dissolve.

The explosion seems to be rendered in 1/2 resolution (except details like sparkles).
Here you can see the wireframe of the explosion particles (pink) some blue trails and on the right some blue stuff which I don't know what it is :D

I was surprised how many particles-planes the explosion used and how volumetric the geo is. This gives the whole effect a good depth.

Some particles are "duplicated". I guess one uses a smoke-texture and the other one fire (more about this later):

The separation of smoke and fire was shown in the official blog post about their vfx https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/cho15m/community_transmission_visual_effects_in_star/

I can see this in the data: There are TWO flipbooks for the SAME smoke/explo. The channels RGB1+RGB2 contain 6 lightmaps in total (at least i guess that they are lightmaps, I didn't see any normal map or motion vectors) and A1 is the Alpha and A2 contains the emissive fire part.

If you take the emissive fire part and put it on top of the smoke it fits perfectly (here i show 1 frame of the whole flipbook). I guess that's why we see the "double" particle geometry (mentioned above).

For coloring the smoke/fire they seem to use a LUT:

This is one of the loopable textures in motion. Fantastic work!

We can also see some smoke trails. Here is their geometry:

Bonus: I love how this texture looks for their smoke.

Bonus 2: I love the little leaf-clusters (which seem to be generated when the camera moves to hide their creation?)

Bonus 3: The impacts do make use of the nice smoke textures as well.