BlastFX
Procedural cinematic explosions for Blender
BlastFX builds ground-blast scenes from a coherent physical configuration — SI units, FPS-independent timing, scale-aware domains — rather than hand-keyframed fire and smoke. One click creates a full blast stack: gas domain with a deterministic pre-bake envelope, fireball, rising column, ground dust, shockwave, debris, flash, camera shake, exposure impulse and heat haze.
Bakes run in a background Blender worker so the UI stays responsive, and caches are content-addressed: nothing is re-baked unless the physical state actually changed.
BlastFX is a visual simulation system. It produces cinematic explosions; it is not an engineering model of real blasts, yields or damage.
Requirements & compatibility
- Blender 5.2 LTS or newer (Mantaflow gas with adaptive domain)
- Cycles recommended for rendering
- Enforces one Blender unit = one metre; scenes with other scale_length values are rejected at creation rather than mis-simulated
Features
- Profiles, not magic numbers
- Deterministic ExplosionProfile data (source topology, combustion, buoyancy, turbulence, timing, camera framing) drives the simulation. Presets ride physical scale profiles.
- Physically timed secondary FX
- Flash, shockwave geometry, camera impulse and dust derive their timing from the physical event timeline — not from independent keyframes.
- Background bake worker
- One non-blocking job at a time, atomic status, cancel-safe. Incomplete generations are never reported as baked.
- Cache you can trust
- State-hash identity covers envelope, profile, seed, FPS, gravity and units. Stale caches are detected and invalidated on file load.
- Quality tiers
- Draft / Preview / Final change only numerical resolution, noise and solver quality — never the underlying event.
- Scene safety
- Generated objects are tagged (blastfx_role / blastfx_id / blastfx_component) and every blast lives in its own removable collection.
Installation
- 01Download blastfx_v1.zip from the v1-beta.1 release.
- 02In Blender: Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > Install… and select the zip.
- 03Enable Blast FX.
- 04Open the panel: 3D View > N > Blast FX.
The repository ships ready-made example scenes under examples/ — test_small, test_medium, test_large and test_large_event. Open one, press Bake Simulation, and render.