Creation

Made in Blender 2.69 based on this amazing tutorial on YouTube:

 

Also, I combined it with some volumetric lighting techniques I've been wanting to try out, and a first dive into the node editor. It didn't quite come out how I imagined, but it was fun and a good learning experience. Plus I love lightflares! What's not to like.

My original idea was to have a person at the center of the explosion, but with the crazy bright lights I ended up going with, you can't even see the model. Color correction on the render was performed in Gimp. Render before Gimp:



Getting away from Adobe and moving towards OpenSource solutions is part of my 2014 resolutions, and I've been struggling with getting familiar with Gimp especially. I'll get there eventually, but right now doing anything in Gimp rather than Photoshop still makes me nervous and miserable.  

Thanks for looking! Let me know what you think, and I'm always interested in hearing your thoughts!