Beautiful fireworks can be created using the Fountain FX. We will do a simple example in this tutorial. We need just one object with two fountains, one for the trail and one for the fireworks proper.
The Scene
A huge black rectangle for the background. This is because we will use Toon Rendering.
The Fountain Emitter will be a cone. A Construction Object.
To this cone we add two Fountain FX, one named Trail, and another named Fireworks.
We then animate the Cone trajectory. In this example, there will be a 5 second trajectory before the explosion.
The animation path of our fireworks
The Trail
The trail has this fountain FX applied.
A fairly large amount of short-lived particles in a small angle. The texture applied to the particles of this fountain is this one:
The Explosion
The explosion starts as a fountain with no particles. Then, suddenly, at 5 seconds, it emits a lot of particles for a single frame and then ceases to emit.
Time=0
Time: 4 seconds, 29 frames
Time: 5 seconds. The explosion takes place
Time: 5 seconds 1 frame. No particles are emitted.
To achieve this frame by frame control, the Edit At: Custom on top of the window is very useful. Just remember to click OK after each frame edit.
We also should make the trail stop after the fireworks explode. I’ll leave that to you. 😉
Now it is a matter of rendering to see the result, and tweak endlessly. Since we’ll be using toon rendering, it will be very fast.
When satisfied, add a little motion blur to soften the effect.
This is one of the cases in which we can add motion blur without much penalty in rendering times.
We should get something like this.
Playing further, we can add fireworks to get something like this.
This is just the beginning…
