Creating fireworks?

[Peter Wassink]

go into these tabs: emitters>particles>current

then you are in the current particle and here you can set a velocity profile to make the particles slow down.

[BruceM]

I've tried adjusting the Velocity amount again, but it's only affecting the size of the explosion. No matter what value I set it to, the speed of the ring of exploding sparkles remains constant, rather than slowing as they move outward from the center.

I know the particle generator is a very complex element in TVP, but I wish they had more complete documentation for it. This is very frustrating.

[BruceM]

Regardless, thank you for your help Peter!

[Peter Wassink]

complex is true ...many parameters,
and then sometimes even not enough...

in order to answer your question i tried it myself and i did get it to work, but in trying i also played around with others like gravity, weight, friction etc. they might play a role
but i'm not precisely sure which.

It would indeed be good to have some documentation with an overview of what exactly all parameters do and how they influence each other.

[Jeremy Richard]

If creating the fireworks by hand is an option, in this documentary The Making of Little Witch Academia OVA from around 52 minutes til 58 minutes, is clearly shown a hand drawn animation of a fireworks, made by the animator Shûhei Handa, which can be studied.

Fireworks_by_Shuhei_Handa-05.jpg (50.25 KiB) Viewed 3215 times

Here is a series of clean drawings from the documentary (zip file):

Fireworks_by_Shuhei_Handa.zip

(1.48 MiB) Downloaded 144 times

On youtube, the keys , (comma) and . (full stop) allow to move forward and backward one frame. If it's not working there are plugins for web browsers, like 'frame by frame', for example.

[BruceM]

Thanks for this Jeremy. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to animate it by hand. I'll have to come up with something more simple.

[D.T. Nethery]

Thanks for this Jeremy. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to animate it by hand. I'll have to come up with something more simple.

I was going to recommend getting the excellent book 'Essential Effects: Water, Fire, Wind, and More' by Mauro Maressa , because he has a section on how to animate fireworks and other explosion effects , but it is frame-by-frame , hand drawn animation technique. (attached is one image from the section on fireworks). Great book. I would highly recommend it. (if not for this project, for a future project, as a good , all-around reference book on how to animate effects). Mauro was one of the top effects animators in the business and I'm happy to say he is a friend of mine, but I would recommend the book even if he were not my friend. It is indeed an essential guide to animating effects.


(click to see larger)

Mauro Maressa got started out as a trainee character animator in the Disney Animation Training Program run by legendary Disney animator Eric Larson and next moved on to Hanna Barbera where he worked as a character animator on Saturday morning TV cartoons such as Godzilla, Superfriends, Scooby Doo and The Smurfs and the Hanna Barbera feature film, Heidi's Song. In 1981 the opportunity to work with Frank Frazetta on the Ralph Bakshi production of "Fire and Ice" presented itself and he jumped at it, doing character and effects animation on that film. Once production on "Fire and Ice" ended he returned to Disney to work on "The Black Cauldron".

In 1985 he decided to leave Disney and go into Live action special effects. Working at Richard Edlund's Boss Films Corp., as well as Perpetual Motion Pictures Studio and Dreamquest Studio, working on films such as, Poltergeist II, Big Trouble in Little China, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and Alien III, and many others.

Baer Animation studio was next, working on TV commercials. Eventually returning once again to Disney in 1993 and worked there as an Effects Animator, Sequence Supervisor and Effects Supervisor/Head of Effects, on the films, Lion King, Hunchback, Hercules and many others until his last, Princess and the Frog in 2009.

So, all that said, something you may want to consider is using a technique often used in traditional effects work which makes use of high contrast film of certain types of effects, such as rain or fireworks , composited within animated scenes (and perhaps augmented with some hand drawn animation.) For example , the famous opening titles of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color television show has live-action fireworks in the sky behind the castle , along with some hand drawn elements . (the live-action was shot on high contrast black-and-white film, then processed with colored backlighting).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N8FhwKEu-Y


In this sequence from 'The Rescuers' the rain is live-action rain composited with the animation. (with some selected rain droplets and splashes that are hand drawn elements , where the water needs to interact with the characters , dripping off their clothing or umbrellas)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4C9_l-5_BU


If you search you can find stock footage of fireworks with a green screen backing , which allows you to composite the fireworks into the sky of your animated scene. Use the Color Keying effect in the FX stack to remove the greenscreen. See: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... Qtd4Z9-8eJ

[slowtiger]

Well, here are my settings for that effect. The attached GIFs show you the elements, their explosion and fade are animated in 9 frames, these are saved as DIP and imported into the FX.

world.png (23.99 KiB) Viewed 3178 times

emitter.png (40.21 KiB) Viewed 3178 times

particle_color.png (29.39 KiB) Viewed 3178 times

color.gif (13.87 KiB) Viewed 3178 times

The trail is for the beginning of the explosion. You'll need to offset the different FX a bit from each other.

particle_trail.png (39.88 KiB) Viewed 3178 times

trail.gif (28.19 KiB) Viewed 3178 times

[BruceM]

DT and Slowtiger, thank you so much for your responses! I needed to hurry and so found some live action fireworks that worked quite well for this application, but I want to be able to produce these kinds of effects organically also. Slowtiger, I will try out these settings you've spelled out for the particle generator.