Tips and Techniques/Natural Phenomena/Sparks
From VFXPedia
- Sparks themselves are really small and they reach bigger apparent size only because of their high brightness. Even peripheral blurred areas of sparks are so bright that they exceed the white point (brighter than 1).
- Set pEmitter \ Style to Ngon, Soft Circular and the Color value to something between 10 and 50 depending on your scene's light conditions (more for night scenes, less for well-lit day scenes). Add some blur and you'll see how the apparent particles' size increases. This way sparks will look right even when you check the normalized image.
- Most of the time sparks move very quickly. Being small objects they cause visible motion blur sampling. Don't hesitate to set MB Quality = 50 or even higher to get continuous motion blur trails.
- To add more natural look to your sparks, apply a high-frequency pTurbulence and edit the pEmitter \ Size over Life graph.
- Sparks often die exploding into smaller pieces. You may want to add a pSpawn setting similar style properties in it, but with a smaller Size and the Lifespan = 1. These secondary particles should also have decreasing brightness (Fade Out) and Size over Life
- You should apply Gamma 1/2.2 to the result of pRender (or Render3D) to integrate your sparks to a truly linear footage.
- The depth of field effect can be quickly simulated using the pQuickDOF macro. This tool increases the size and transparency of particles as they get out of focus. You can achieve a very realistic effect if you use an accurately created bokeh shape as the source for the Bitmap-style particles.
