Resilient Picture Company shows how you can make a sexy explosion using Houdini, Blender, and Natron.

While the latest builds of Blender added some new fluid dynamic tools in Mantaflow, Blender users have options. In this tutorial by the Resilient Picture Company shows how you can create a mini-pipeline using Houdini, Blender, and Natron for compositing to create a realistic-looking explosion.

Explosions in Houdini.

Houdini offers a lot of tools that make this type of effects work pretty straightforward. If you are not familiar with Natron, it is a free and open-sourced compositor that lets you work with nodes. Natron has a bunch of advanced features for visual effect compositing with supporting both free and commercial OpenFX plugins, a command-line tool, rotoscoping features, and an integrated tracker node.