Fireburst Smoke

This project tries to emulate the look of a large fireburst explosion with sparks shooting out leaving smoke trails.

The fireburst (layer name "fire") is made up of four quick sequential burts of particles at slightly different positions. Select the layer and press the 'u' key to see the keyframes for Position XY and Particles/sec. The particles use the "flame" pre-comp which is a 3 sec seamless loop of Fractal Noise. The particles are orange and added together to form a fire-like color scale.

A burst of dust is created using a tiny sphere particle type with some Physics>Air>Turbulence Field to create a slightly random motion, emulating fluid dynamics.

The sparks are flickering particles (look at Opacity over Life to see their flickering property). They are emitted with high velocity into a Physics>Air>Turbulence Field with a high value for Scale to create the fast sideways random motion. The sparks emit Aux particles as they go. Hit "Options" to see some of the specific settings used for the Aux system; Emit Probability is 20% - this means there is a 20% chance that a spark will have an Aux particle trails coming from it. Start Emit is 0 and Stop Emit is 40 - this means the main particle will emit Aux particles from 0% to 40% of its life, after that, it will not emit Aux particles anymore. The Aux particles are affected by the Wind so they slowly move upwards. The sparks are also affected by the Wind, but because they move so fast it is hardly noticable.

A lens-flare is added tracking the position of the firebursts to increase realism.