"No source object selected as particle instance"

[ZachHandley]

I am trying to bake an explosion animation, but all I can get is the title.

I read that the explode modifier is tricky in the docs, but I wasn't sure if it's impossible or not

[Scaryplasmon]

Hi @ZachHandley!
Unfortunately the explosion fx is not really supported at the moment.

This is cause rather than spawning particles, it breaks the mesh and simulates those pieces "exploding" 💥

The specific error you're facing is due to the fact that u don't have any object selected while clicking bake.
The addon basically instantiates all the objects u have selected as particles for the emitter object you have active.

I'm guessing you don't want this as behaviour, but if it helps u can just select a a bunch of objects while clicking bake and those will become the Particles of the simulation so you will see them being thrown away following the explosion trajectories.

but if what you're trying to achieve is Keyframing the splitted parts of the mesh you set your explosion fx on, then u have to

• Manually segment the mesh before-hand,
• setting the number of particles in the particle setting = to the number of splits,
• click bake by keeping the individual objects selected individually,
• get rid of the clones that spawned in the wrong direction.
  Repeat for all the splits u want to achieve.

Its very convoluted and honestly a very bad UX !

If you share more details about what you're trying to achieve i might be able to implement this "explosion" feature into the addon, but for now it's supported very poorly! Sorry!

[ZachHandley]

All good! I was just trying to get a low poly crate (e.g. https://poly.pizza/m/YAghI6GBls) to have a "death" animation, where basically I wanted it to break apart. I tried doing the cell fracture method too, but because of the concave meshes (or some other reason) the cell fracture doesn't work on any of the cube meshes. I could split it by hand, but at that point it's just a lot of work for my personal site haha

And please don't feel bad or apologize! It's very dumb IMO for Blender to make the explosion modifier not generate real meshes/objects

[Scaryplasmon]

Thanks for explaining! That's a nice idea!

The quick explosion is such an old feature i guess it's completely out of their radar!
But you're right it would be so much easier to handle if those were real objects.
Like it's implemented now it's literally take it or leave it ahaha

cell fracture relies heavily on the type of geometry you're dealing with. Works great with walls!

I'll see what i can do and if it's easy enough i'll add it as a feature of the addon! It might help some other exploder out there ahhah!

Ill leave this thread open in the meantime!

Thanks for the Feedback which is always super appreciated!

[ZachHandley]

Thanks a lot! No need to thank me, I'm not doing anything! I appreciate the package, it lets people like myself (who are less 3D Modellers and more fullstack/backend devs haha) do more 3D effects, I love the package!

If it's possible, just taking the same idea as them and basically taking the existing pieces of the mesh, and then cutting it into different polygons would work, though it should only really work on anything beyond the faces of the mesh.

Thanks for all your work and effort, it's nice to see someone who's passionate about their creation :)

[Scaryplasmon]

Hi There @ZachHandley , I hope you managed to solve your Explosion somehow.

But, in the case in which u still haven't managed, Cake Particles now supports Explosions! 💥

It's still very much a WIP, so if you have the chance to test it out and tell me if you encounter issues, that would be very helpful. But no pressure 😊

To test it out, since it's still in active Development, you have to:

-Uninstall the current version of CakeParticles in your Blender
-Copy the script at https://github.com/Scaryplasmon/CakeParticles/blob/main/CakeParticles.py
-Open the Scripting tab in Blender

-Click on New
-Paste the CakeParticles.py script u copied
-Hit Play

After that you should see the CakeParticles tab in the object properties like usual but with a new item (Cake Explosion)
and you can follow this to explode your mesh.

There are no 🐞🐜 as far as i'm aware of,
but there's still an issue, that i'm gonna fix at some point, for which the mesh Pieces have random orientation when exploding, so you might have to play around with the Simulation seed (in the particle settings) and the Explosion Seed to find the best Explosion for your mesh.

Final version will also support better Smoke and Liquid simulations baking-export.

Thanks for your feedback which drove further development of CakeParticles! 🍰💥

[ZachHandley]

super cool! Thanks so much! I'll try it out :)

[ZachHandley]

@Scaryplasmon Hey so I pasted the script in, have the explosion modifier, but when I hit run, nothing happens

Am I doing anything wrong? I used the file at https://github.com/Scaryplasmon/CakeParticles/blob/main/CakeParticles.py

[Scaryplasmon]

hey there @ZachHandley sorry if i was unclear, the script you ran basically adds the addon to its panel with all its functionalities
So rather than just making the object explode it adds the addon.
You will find the usual panel in the object properties, along with the new explosion tab.
here's the panel, let me know if that works for you! 🍰💥

[ZachHandley]

OH DOH. My apologies, was looking at the wrong tab!!

My only real issue is a similar one that I had with the fracture effect -- I exploded it, and used the following settings:

with a crate like so: https://poly.pizza/m/3OEFd1AWfa

and then I end up with a huge chunk of the core body of the crate like this

Are there any settings I could tweak to get that working correctly? I think it's because of the interior meshes, which I wish it wouldn't take into account haha

[Scaryplasmon]

oh damn, that is indeed quite a frustrating mesh!
i think you will have to give up on that mesh, or any other mesh built that way to be honest.

I link you here the mesh i've made which performs better.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zL3fcxPN73BI2LdYBudZt_0NyrAcG83x/view?usp=sharing

[ZachHandley]

For some reason I still can't get it to work, this look perfect when I preview the explosion itself, but whenever I do it, it seems to have the original object as most of the cut (this is using the object file you provided, thank you!!! by the way for that)

vs what my explode looks like:

[Scaryplasmon]

hi @ZachHandley you're right, i've tried reimporting the mesh in blender and the new glb file does indeed explode in one huge chunk and tiny tiny shards.

i have tbh that is quite a tricky problem, i'm a bit busy these days, but i'll send you a new version as soon as i manage to get my hands on it!

the issue lays in the geometry changes that happen when exporting and importing the mesh which seems to cause problems to the geometry. This means that any imported object would cause similar issues :(
Not sure if its the glb format or happens also for fbx. i'll have to test it!
I've tried going from tris to quads, adjusting normals, not really sure why that happens.

the quest for the explosion continues! ahahha

if in the meantime you're in a rush, you can try modeling the box yourself. the one modeled in Blender would explode just fine. the issue lies in import export that breaks the mesh for this sort of usecases!
Best of luck with your website!