My fire explosion shot was one of my most ambitious scenes because it was quite difficult to keep track of all the different moving parts. First, I had to rebuild the entire cathedral to be destruction friendly, since the original model had numerous intersections. I used a number of methods, including cloning/symmetries, booleans, and VDBs. I then worked on a bricking tool that cuts each part of the building into tiling bricks. Then it was just a matter of constraining them all together and running a few dozen destruction sims. I rendered this scene in Redshift, taking advantage of its speed, especially with pyro. In total, this scene took nearly two months to create.