Introduction
A space battle is never complete unless there is a shockwave with your explosions. A shockwave gives the shot that extra burst of energy to speed things up and make the overall scene more effective. This tutorial will show how to create a basic shockwave in Blender, though there is a more complex and better looking shockwave tutorial available, this one is better for learning steps.
* This tutorial was rewritten and adapted for the latest Blender platform, originally from Kevin and Andrea's FourCats.
Creating the ring
1. Start Blender and delete the default cube.
2. Add a circle (SPACE > ADD > MESH > CIRCLE > OK).
3. With the vertices already selected, press E to extrude (choose region), then right click once to deselect them.
4. Scale the selected vertices out slightly by pressing S and draggin outwards. (Tip: If you hold CTRL while dragging, you can scale to exact increments which are displayed at the bottom left, try scaling to about 1.800).
5. Exit edit mode (TAB) and go to Shading (F5) add a new material in the material buttons, then a new texture in the texture buttons.
6. In the Texture buttons choose Marble, turn the Turbulence slider to 32.
7. Go to the Material buttons and adjust the colours in the 'Material' tab (mid left) as well as the colours in the 'Map to' tab (right), until you get yellow and orange swirls. Also change the Emit slider to 0.725.
Creating the particle ring
1. Add another circle, scale it so that it's slightly larger than the other ring and the press TAB.
2. Go to Object (F7), in the 'Effects' tab (right) press 'NEW EFFECT', the change Build to Particles.
3. Change the options to the following:
Tot: 2800
Norm: -0.052
Ob: 1.000
Rand: 0.092
Tex: 1.156
Damp: 0.824
4. Add a new material and change the colour to orange.
5. Choose the second ring, then while holding down shift choose the first ring, then press CTRL+P.
Animating the Shockwave
1. Choose the first ring and scale it down so it's really small, the other ring should scale as well.
2. Press I, choose Size.
3. Go to the Material buttons, with your cursor over the window, press I, choose Ofs.
4. Press the right arrow button to go to frame 125 (you can see the frame number at the bottom left).
5. Go to the camera view (numpad 0).
6. Scale the ring so that it's too big for the camera to see, then press I and choose size.
7. In the Material buttons, you'll find a button called OfsX in the 'Map Input' tab (right), change it to 1.000, then press I and choose Ofs.
8. Choose the second ring and go to the Material Buttons, with your cursor over the window, press I and choose RGB.
8. Go back to frame 1 (SHIFT+Left Arrow).
9. In the Material buttons change the colours to white, then, with your cursor over the materials window, press I, choose RGB.
Basically that's it, you can render the animation, it may not look too good, but you can adjust it around easily to suite your scene.