Thursday, 03 May 2012 19:04

Tutorial: Fireworks with Particles in Blender 2.63

Written by  Gottfried Hofmann
Tutorial: Fireworks with Particles in Blender 2.63
Frederik Steinmetz shows you a wonderfull trick how to force particles to emit other particles in Blender 2.63+ while Gottfried Hofmann will show you how to arrange a nice fireworks display with the Blender VSE.

At the moment it is (in theory) not possible for Blender's particles to emit further particles. Thus creating fireworks becomes really difficult if trails are a requirement. You can of course use the smoke simulator to create trails, but many clients want a clean CG solution without smoke. Fortunately Frederik Steinmetz found am implementation of the clean way using a dirty little trick.

Dim lights

Download the finished Blendfile for this part here!

The next part shows you how to create a cool fireworks display from the single elements using scenes and the VSE:

Dim lights

Download the finished Blendfile here!

Additional Info

  • CC-BY 3.0: This tutorial and blendfiles are released under the Creative Commons License CC-BY 3.0 Unported
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Dim lights Final Result
More in this category: « Use the Double Edge Node to Stylize your Rendering Tutorial: Animated Pintoy »

22 comments

  • Comment Link Peter Power Sunday, 12 May 2013 22:06 posted by Peter Power

    ... But Andrews Tuts are unbeaten when it comes to explaining things. Even my shoe can follow his tuts. While Gottfrieds and generally many other tuts are for (semi-) pros. But not especially for beginners. At least this tut here was sometimes hard for me to follow. This was mostly cause I did not get what he planned to do. Only my two cents.

    But nevertheless nice tut. Keep on with your tuts. I am sure there are people out there who can follow. I worked myself through and got results. So I am not saying that these tuts here are bad. This was never my intention!

  • Comment Link God Tuesday, 30 April 2013 13:40 posted by God

    By the way... it seem like the explode modifier can't handle a vertex emitter setting (in the second emitter)... my blender keep crashing when I try that configuration... It's like once the explode modifier get aplicated, the program can't calculate well the exploded object's position of each single vertex. Someone else have that problem?

  • Comment Link Jo Friday, 01 March 2013 02:23 posted by Jo

    Comment to Luxman

    I had the same problem. He is actually deleting the bottom face of the cone by deleting the bottom vertex. If you take a closer look you'll see that he is tilting the cone.

    Just delete the bottom face.

  • Comment Link Uwe Sunday, 30 December 2012 17:21 posted by Uwe

    Ich nutze Blender 2.65,
    gutes Tut, nur leider finde ich kein "Spin " im Partikelsystem->Rotation->Angular Velocity.....
    Was kann ich tun ?

  • Comment Link esnho Monday, 17 December 2012 03:58 posted by esnho

    It would be nice to follow this tutorial but, I've got the same Luxman's flip normals problem and when I add the second particle system (minute 9:00) those particles move to a side, they are not just falling, like there is some wind...

    I'm using blender 2.65. And this is the file with te particle error: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/18517799/errorParticle.blend

  • Comment Link BlueCreatives Thursday, 15 November 2012 17:03 posted by BlueCreatives

    eine frage,wie lege ich diese sachen übereinander,im vid editotr?
    bin noch anfänger ^^ seit 1 monat erst dabei.

  • Comment Link Luxman Sunday, 14 October 2012 17:50 posted by Luxman

    I am missing something...Right at the beginning of the first tutorial if I delete the top vertex from the cone it becomes a circle...If I choose to delete the face I still get a cone but then after I add a particle system and set the gravity to -2, got o edit mode, selecct everything and flip to normals I can't get the particles behave the same like your model (some of them are still popping up a little before going down). Any clue?
    Thanks!

  • Comment Link Rosie Tuesday, 18 September 2012 16:10 posted by Rosie

    This is a great tutorial!! I coul listen to your voice forever. Beautiful accent. x

  • Comment Link feuerwerk video download Saturday, 15 September 2012 05:20 posted by feuerwerk video download

    Dies war ein super Beitrag und ich bin glücklich die Homepage über Bing gefunden zu haben.
    Kurzum das ist ein lesewerter Web-blog und wir freuen uns mehr zu lesen.
    Danke dafür!
    Bloggige Grüße

  • Comment Link Borrus Tuesday, 04 September 2012 21:41 posted by Borrus

    Thank you very much for this tutorial - I love your results!

  • Comment Link tarik bagriyanik Wednesday, 29 August 2012 18:32 posted by tarik bagriyanik

    Dear Gottfried, i have done this nice tutorial 3 months ago, i forgot to put it in a movie, sorry:

    http://youtu.be/xcbJxRg9kH8

  • Comment Link Gottfried Hofmann Sunday, 13 May 2012 14:27 posted by Gottfried Hofmann

    Hey John D Smith II, I guess I should have been clearer about why this one is not using smoke sim. The reason is simple: Clients often require a clean CG solution, without the smoke that is an unwanted by-product of real fireworks. I'm talking from experience. During my AE days I once sold a clean CG firework. I've also looked around ads that use fireworks during the last few years and they either use stock footage of real fireworks (which can be bought really cheaply from various sites) or fireworks created from CG or Photoshop without smoke.

    CptGreenwood: Afaik the time-stamps only work with the Flash-version of the YT player.

  • Comment Link John D Smith II Saturday, 12 May 2012 22:11 posted by John D Smith II

    Actually, that is a good point Stefan... Hey Gottfried and Frederik, if you guys can work out how to do a convincing smoke sim and layer it in, then delay the sound a few seconds I think you will really have nailed the firework experience! Nice work guys. Peace.

  • Comment Link S Thursday, 10 May 2012 18:31 posted by S

    Awesome stuff, just found the tutorial to be a bit too quick to follow without pausing all the time

  • Comment Link CptGreenwood Thursday, 10 May 2012 08:47 posted by CptGreenwood

    @Gottfried: I'm using latest IE on Win7. When I switched to "compatibility mode" in IE, I can see the two video frames which were just grey lines before. But a red X icon is displayed inside the Blender Diplom Player frames. Which plugin di I need? is ist Flash?

  • Comment Link Gottfried Hofmann Wednesday, 09 May 2012 13:10 posted by Gottfried Hofmann

    CptGreenwood: Just checked them, all fine here. What browser are you using? Do you have something like NoScript running?

    All: Thanks for the comments :)

  • Comment Link CptGreenwood Tuesday, 08 May 2012 15:01 posted by CptGreenwood

    In my browser the timestamp links are all "javascript:;", when I click on them nothing happens.

  • Comment Link Thomas Monday, 07 May 2012 08:35 posted by Thomas

    In my opinion the foremost advantage of using scenes together with the camera override function in the VSE is that you actually are able to render more than one camera in a scene at one!

  • Comment Link LswaN Saturday, 05 May 2012 18:17 posted by LswaN

    Ooh, this looks like a really cool tutorial, can't wait to watch it!

  • Comment Link Behzad Saturday, 05 May 2012 18:04 posted by Behzad

    really deep and informative tutorial.. and best of all emit particle from particle...Nice!
    thanks blenderdiplom

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