> I've posted a scene in the scenes group in the hope of soliciting feedback 
> on
> improving it to make it more like the tutorial it's based upon.
>
> I would appreciate any tips.

It's much simpler conceptually if you replace all the
mesh operation details with more descriptive POV.

Part one describes an animated lathe/SOR, I would
sketch out on grid paper the profiles of the mushroom
cloud over time and then make splines that cut
across the profiles starburst-ways. Then a macro to
create a lathe object by sampling the splines at a given
time.

Part two describes an animated displacement map,
since POV doesn't have a true displacement map
feature you need to decide if you want to use normals,
or isosurfaces. POV noise is already perlin, so it can
be animated without pre-rendering. You could look
at ISO_CSG, it has a SOR, then you could add the
noise function.

Part three is texturing, and lighting. The texturing
is almost identical to the noise function, and the
lights are a simple ring of spots, there's nothing
really complex there. Throughout I would use splines
instead of arrays, that way you aren't bound to
keyframes.

Part four is other stuff, rings, ground surge, and
though it's not depicted in Ilya's animation, there's
often shock streamers.

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