[OpenMaw]

Some years ago I recall someone found the original stock footage that was used for the Octabrain's brain blast effect. It was based on a pool of gas being hit with a match or something along those lines. It appeared and was reused later on in the Duke Nukem Time To Kill trailer,and I know it crops up in the 2006 footage of DNF, also. I was just wondering if anyone had a link to that stock footage still lying around?

[Hendricks266]

They come from a stock footage compilation called Pyromania. Some of the materials are still being sold. Note however that any 16:9 or 1080p copies you buy will be cropped at the top and bottom, which is unacceptable. The original compilation disc probably would not have this problem.

Jimmy, on 26 April 2014 - 03:02 PM, said:

Was talking in the #EDuke32 IRC channel, got on the subject of the stock footage 3DR used to create effects in Duke3D.

Source for the Duke3D/Blood/Nuclear SW explosion.
Source of SW's gas/smoke puff.
Source for Octabrain mindblast.
Source of some of the Duke3D/Blood/SW fire sprites.
I believe Fate or another Build game might have used this explosion.
You can see a very small preview for the Blood explosion on this page. This is also the page where you can buy the VFX compilation disk.

Fox, on 26 April 2014 - 03:04 PM, said:

The videos in the first video are cropped, which is just silly. The second one seems good.

Jimmy, on 26 April 2014 - 03:06 PM, said:

Yeah, I'm not sure what the deal is with that. I've never seen it without the clipping, so I'm assuming that 3DR drew the rest of the sprite.

[OpenMaw]

Hendricks266, on 02 January 2020 - 11:07 AM, said:

They come from a stock footage compilation called Pyromania. Some of the materials are still being sold only. Note however that any 16:9 or 1080p copies you buy will be cropped at the top and bottom, which is unacceptable. The original compilation disc probably would not have this problem.

Hah! There it is.

Thank you, sir!

[OpenMaw]

I bought one of the DVD/CD's off of Amazon. The first fire and explosions compilation.

It has the brain blast and the original mushroom cloud in it.

Unfortunately, they are still cropped in there as well. I'm thinking about breaking them down into individual images. They could still be used to create higher res and faithful versions for Duke 3D.

[Jimmy]

I've been trying to find pre-HD versions of the discs for YEARS with no luck.

[Hendricks266]

Yeah, I think the source material was cut off at the very top even before the HD release. I recall seeing stuff in Stephen Hornback's workspace where he drew on the top of the explosion once it got too tall.

@OpenMaw: Are they cropped in the same way as the HD versions available on the internet, or are the 16:9 versions cropped worse? If they're the same then the HD ones may be useful after all.

[OpenMaw]

I was wrong, I wasn't looking at it correctly. Trying to convert the .mov which is 720x486, to another format was just crushing it and compressing it no matter what I did.

So instead I slowed VLC to an absolute crawl and took screen grabs. Here are all the frames.

https://www.dropbox....18s546.zip?dl=0

Also, earlier in the year, I had purchased the fire blast effect off of pond5 before realizing that it was cropped even outside of the preview.

In theory both could be used to create an even higher quality version of the effect.

I'll be doing the Duke3D mushroom cloud next.

[Hendricks266]

Try using FFmpeg to extract the frames directly. I pulled this out of a batch file I have:

ffmpeg -i InputFile.Ext -f image2 -pix_fmt rgb24 -vcodec png "SomeOutputName_%04d.png"

(If you put this in a .bat file, you'll need to change the % to %%.)

[OpenMaw]

Done!

Brain blast:
https://www.dropbox....1_0001.zip?dl=0

Mushroom Cloud 1
https://www.dropbox....1_0001.zip?dl=0


Mushroom Cloud 2
https://www.dropbox....2_0001.zip?dl=0

Fire loop
https://www.dropbox....1_0001.zip?dl=0

Between all of these I think all of the explosions/fire in Duke3D can be upgraded with higher res/true color versions.

Keep in mind the mushroom cloud is still cropped, even on the DVD. I think that's just the way that shot ended up being and the rest of the blast was created manually. At the very least this could help to create an AI upscale that is very accurate to the original sprite explosion, yes?

The fire loop is just a bunch of fire, but it was pointed out up thread the various fire loops are contained within it. Someone with patience and photoshop skills should be able to pull those.

There are two other clips I may pull and convert. One is the DNF 1998 fireball seen in the trailer, and the other is the film burn effect seen in the opening of Time To Kill.