Adding flying debris

So now we are going to create all the debris that's flying from this explosion way off in a distance. Now it sounds complicated, but it's not, it's just creating a brush. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my Marquee tool here, and I make sure I'm in a layer that's mostly transparent, and the front smoke is mostly transparent. So I'm going to go up right here. I know there's nothing there. Let's go look at that layer. See? There's nothing there. So I'm going to just create long little rectangle like that. And I'm going to go ahead and fill that with black.

I have it selected still, so I'm going to say Define Brush Preset, and we'll call it debris. I can throw it away, you select it, it's gone, but it is a brush. So I'm going to go into my brush and select-- there it is right there. It's just this little black which you know it's going to do this. It's got some modifications now, it's got a full opacity, and you could see it's just doing that. It's following whatever I set up for the smoke the last time.

So we'll undo that, and we are going to create a whole set of flying debris here. I'm going to go into my brush engine where I'm going to modify this. I'm going to give it a lot of spacing. I'm going to go into Shape Dynamics where I'm going to give it a lot of Size Jitter and set up a minimum, so they won't become too tiny, but very small, because I do want some little tiny things. And I'm going to set my Roundness, so some of them will be flatter, right? Flip that all the way up. Minimum Roundness, we will bring that down as well.

And then I'm going to go into my Color Dynamics. Color Dynamics, I'm going to go in there and say Foreground to Background and add a couple of extra colors in there and throw some jitter-- maybe not that much Hue, okay, right in there--and I'm going to scatter them. I am going to scatter them in both directions all over the place. Now we can see the spacing. Let's go back and bring them a little closer together, so now we start to get--okay, there we go. That's starting to look little better. And you're starting to see what's going to happen there.

So I click OK, and I'm going to make it a much smaller brush. And I'm going to go to the top of my layer stack here, so we go all the way to the top, let's bring our little layers here, so we can see that, then we'll go way up to the top--actually, it should be in front of the explosion itself. So where is that front smoke? There is the front smoke. So right there is where I'll create a New layer which we'll call flying debris. I'm going to pick some colors. I've got a nice deep brown for my foreground, and for my background I'm going to pick kind of beige color, somewhere in that neighborhood, right about there.

And then I'm going to just start to draw right in here, and there we can see that we have all this flying debris, stuff just flying around that's from the explosion just stuff flying around, and I'm going to make the brush a little smaller and kind of fill up this area here with a lot more of it. And there we see that we have the flying debris from the explosion. Now in the next and final movie, we are going to finalize this by adding all the nice little touches and little more drama to the lighting and the effects of the explosion on the other buildings that are in front of us.