Fireworks Cascade

This project tries to emulate the look of a cascade of fireworks shooting up from below the screen into the sky with realistic lit smoke that correspond to the fireworks.

This project actually contains no keyframes! The technique heavily utilizes the power of mulitiple layers of particles to create a natural look.

First, the "fireworks" layer was created. It is a wide emitter located at the bottom of the screen. It shoots a few particles upwards and has Physics>Gravity to pull them down in a natural looking path. Since they have Emnitter>Direction Spread they are emitted in slightly different directions. The Aux system is used to create the trails. In "Options" it can be seen that every main particle will release Aux particles because Emit Probability is 100%. Furthermore, it can be seen that the main particle will emit Aux particles until 80% of its lifetime. The main particle has a "chopped up" Opacity over Life curve to make it flicker. A slight wind from left to right makes the trails float slowly across the screen.

Once the "fireworks" layer was finished, it was duplicated and the duplicate was named "smoke". In the smoke layer, the main particle size was changed to 0 so it is invisible. Then the Aux particle type was changed to Smokelet and the Aux>Particles/sec was decreased and size was adjusted to look like realistic smoke trails. The smoke layer was placed behind the fireworks.

Finally, to light the smoke, a second duplicate of "fireworks" was made. This layer was called "lights". Here, the Aux particles was completely shut off and the main particles where increased radically in size and with full feather to create large flickering "blobs" that correspond exactly to the main particles in the "fireworks" layer. This layer was then used as an Alpha Matte for the smoke layer. The resulting effect is that the particles in the "fireworks" layer seem to light the smoke.