How to Make Sparks

In this tutorial you will discover:

How to create realistic sparks using Cycles
How to use the new particle info node
How to create motion blur

I’ve always been fascinated with the beauty of sparks, and have wanted to create them for a while, but the results were always disappointing. This was mainly due to their being no way to change the color or opacity of the sparks throughout the animation.

However, the particle info node recently came to Blender and saved the day! We can now finally delve in to creating some satisfying sparks

Here’s what we’ll make:

Finished Result

Plus, a bonus slow mo version:

Download the Finished .blend

Reference Videos

Text Version

Not a fan of video tutorials? Not a problem. I’ve typed out the whole tutorial so that you can scroll past the stuff you know and skip to the good bits. (Italian Translation)

Creating the spark emitter

1. Delete the default cube and lamp, and add a Cylinder.

2. Go to side view (Numpad 3) and rotate the cylinder by 90 degrees.

3. Go into edit mode and from the front view (Numpad 1) select 3/4 of the mesh as pictured, then press delete.

You should now have a quarter cylinder like this:

4. Scale it down along the Y axis to make it thinner, then scale the whole thing as pictured:

Creating the sparks

5. With the cylinder still selected, add a new particle system and set the settings as shown:

6. Set the normal amount to 10, and random to 5, to shoot the sparks in every which way.

7. For even more randomness, add a subsurf modifier above the particle system so the cylinder shape isn’t so visible in the particles:

8. We need a floor, so add a plane and scale it up to be the size of the grid floor.

9. To make the sparks bounce off the floor, go to the collision settings and change the Damping and Friction as shown:

10. Add an icoshere and place it somewhere below the floor. This will actually be what each particle looks like.

11. Select the particle emitter, go to the particle render settings and set it to use the icosphere as shown:

Making the Sparks change color over time

12. Since the particle system is using the icosphere to render it, the spark material must be applied to the icosphere.

13. Switch to the Node Editor coz it’s about to get advanced and we need more control.

14. Press Shift+A and add a Particle Info node (new feature!).

The Particle Info node is a wonderful addition to blender that allows you to change a particle’s material according to a particle system’s velocity, lifetime and age etc. This allows us to (finally) be able to make particles fade out, as you’ll soon see…

15. Add a Math node (Add>Convertor>Math) and set the type to Divide, then connect it to the Age and Lifetime outputs as shown:

This confusing looking setup basically takes the particles Age and Divides it by it’s Lifetime, allowing us to change it’s material based on how long it’s been alive. If you’re confused, it’ll make sense soon…

16. Add a ColorRamp node (Add>Convertor>ColorRamp) and connect as shown:

This Color Ramp will now act as the color of the particles. The left side will be the color at the particles birth, and the right side will be the color at it’s death.

17. When sparks are born they are white/yellow hot and slowly cool to a red color before dying. So change the Color Ramp node to match that:

Give it a render to see if our ploy worked:

Great success! The particles start white hot, but turn red as they die.

Making the Sparks Fade Out

Next we’ll make the sparks fade out. This will be accomplished by blending the emission shader with a transparent shader.

18. Add a transparent shader:

19. Add a Mix Shader node and position and connect it to the Math node and two shaders as pictured:

Success! It’s not very noticeable, but the particles now fade out as they die. This makes for a much smoother animation.

Adding Motion Blur

A new feature available in trunk is Motion Blur for Cycles. Applying it to this scene will give the sparks that familiar trailing look. Let’s try it out…

20. Go to the render panel and enable Motion Blur with a shutter speed of 0.7. ~~Motion blur is currently only supported in CPU.~~ Update! Motion blur now works in GPU as well! Available in any release after revision 52645 (download latest build here).

Finished!

Serving suggestion: Add a circular saw for some sweet particle bounces.

Hope you enjoyed the tutorial!

Creating something cool using this tutorial? Post it in the comments below.

About Andrew Price

User of Blender for 9+ years. I've written tutorials for 3d World Magazine and spoken at three Blender conferences. My goal is to help artists get employed in the industry by making training accessible and easy to understand. I'm an Aussie and I live in South Korea ;)

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Pamela

fabulous tutorial! thank you. Everything works except when I added sound the sparks disappeared. What to do?
http://www.facebook.com/nazzareno.giannelli Nazzareno Giannelli

Awesome tutorial as always! But I’ve a problem when trying to render the scene: I cannot achieve noise free image, even if I’m setting 4000 passes (that is quite toooo much). i7, 16gb of ram and a gtx 660 card here…I guess it’s not an hardware issue
Sulfur

and here is the image
Guest

here
Sulfur

Thanks for the tutorial, I just made simple firework using the skills on the tut.
ben

ive done everyhting at the start exactly how it was done on yours but when i click plaay i dont see any animation
Nkcr

How the hell did you manage to make the slowmotion? Tried with time remapping with no success!

But great tutorial, thank you very much!
http://twitter.com/PigPocher John Fowler

The slow motion sparks look BEAUTIFUL!
Nathan Ferguson

Here are my results Awesome tutorial!
Ifan

Here is my result. Great tutorial as always. Thank you Andrew.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Timothy-Embden/1411353914 Timothy Embden

Hey Andrew, i am a HUUGGGEEEE fan of your work and tutorials !! i had a question about this one though…after following all directions, when i render my sparks come out blue for some reason. Can you please help me?
ArchArtas

Oh and here’s the result. http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/9408/asdasdasdse.png
ArchArtas

Hi. I tried to make these sparks and even the blade saw but its not satisfying. The blade saw doesnt reflect light, just points. Textures arent even visible, just black. Oh and last problem, maybe you know something, sometimes when I change something(like shader on blade), blender doesnt render anything(black screen), and it looks like random acts to me, which is very annoying. Thanks in advance.
Ian

Sparks animation is amazing! Did you use an external light source and the compositor? I can’t get rid of noise in my render (2000 samples) I guess the light emitted from particles is to hard for cycles to compute. any ideas? how long per frame id it take to render?
Ian

Video is amazing! how long did it take to render each frame? I followed your tutorial and set samples to 2000 but still I get lots of noise is this due to particles emitting not enough light to light scene? did you add a light to your animation? It looks photo realistic, best I’ve seen. I wish I could get a render with out noise even if just 1 frame!

David S

Try out the “Clamp” in the Scene settings (render settings) under “Sampling”. Play around a bit, you’ll get the hang of it It darkens the very shiny bright lights to reduce noise!

http://www.facebook.com/ariel.frigoli Ariel Frigoli

Hi, thanks for the tutorial, it´s amazing!!!

but there 2 options that don´t appears on my blender 2.46, I download the new version 2.65 and don´t appears neither…

1) render doesn´t show me the option of device
2) In the depht field section don´t show me the option of aperture.

Pls, do you know what happen?

David S

Using Blender Render Engine? Better use Cycles, Andrew used it for this tutorial, too It’s integrated into Blender! Just pick it at the top in Blender window..

alexfabricio41

Muy buen trabajo, y tambien la página, no entiendo el ingles, pero siguiendo lo que haces y talvez alguna que otra palabra técnica, lo entiendo por lo menos en un 50%, solo quisiera saber talvez, si algún dia piensa en poner la pagina o tutoriales para aquellos seguidores tuyos que nos encantan, en español algún dia. Tengo guardado todos tus tutoriales, y quisiera porder sacarles el provecho al máximo. Eres excelente, y si no lo haces, aun así seguire mirándolos y aprendiendo lo mas que pueda, por lo menos, con lo que entienda mas
alexfabricio41

Excelente trabajo, no había escrito antes por timido, pero me encanta tu página.
Kieker

Thank you for the great tutorial! I am very new to blender, but working with it is great. I couldn’t get the node editor to function properly, but I realised that I was still in blender render and not in cycles render.
ChargingImage

Hallo Andrew!

To the point. I wanted to make slow-mo, like you did

blender ver: 2.64.0 (official)

Steps: Render->time remapping: 100:800
Observation: in “material” mode, animation looks like I wanted to. I change to cycles-render mode… and->
Problem: Particles dies strange. I have to increase numer to 100k, and end to 800, with lifetime… of 800.
Problem: There is color bug. Some of them are blue/green. Don’t know why. (in attachment)

Question: Is there any way, to slow-mo beyond 120fps? I want to make animation of fast sparks, then ultra-slow-mo, then fast again. Without rendering unnecessary frames. If there is any paid tutorial of yours – tell me where. Perfect scenario would be: I make scene in “normal speed” and then just remap time, but blenders calculates missing frames of simulations/movement/keyframes. Is it possible?

Yes/no answer is ok (yes means I can search, no means I waste my time )
Koh Jun Dong

Thank you, Andrew! Your tutorial let me did a firework. (Single firework)
J Newman

Howcome when you make a new material, it only has surface displacement and settings there. But when i make a new material, it has diffuse, specular, shading, mirror and all this other stuff. I think that if i can get my material to be just the surface, displacement and setting like yours, my nodes will connect to my material, instead of being connected to no material.

rjhewgyrfu

switch to cycles

Willi

Hi Andrew, short info for you. Now blur will work with GPU. Blender Version 2.65 best regards Willi
http://www.facebook.com/007agentjames Agnivesh Sp

I need help rendering an animation of 954 frames in cycles at the frame rate of 23.50 .I dont have a gpu card so it will take about,let’s say 2 days.Any one intrested please contact. “007agentjames@gmail.com” and i will send you the blend file,
JawsOfLife

Here is my go…This is essentially the first thing I’ve ever done in Blender! Thoughts/Feedback? P.S., and this is something I noticed in Andrew’s renders too, with motion blur, the sparks that are very close to the cylinder piece look as if they are being sucked INTO the emitter, rather than being shot out. Any thoughts on why this is?
Matthew Wiltzius

Hey, any chance you could share the .blend you made in the tutorial? I’m getting odd results and was hoping to make side-by-side comparisons.

Anyway, I really appreciate the work you put into this. I’ve improved tenfold thanks to your tutorials.
http://www.facebook.com/thomas.ododo Thomas Ododo

Hey Andrew, thanks to your tutorials I’ve done this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=GrhJNaoR0V0 Thank u very much and keep your awesome work, and btw congratulations on your wedding!
Giacomo Sardelli

Hi! This is the first time I use blender, so I’m actually quite impressed of what I was able to achieve, thanks to this precise tutorial. Is there anyone here who knows why I’m not getting the reflections on the plane? I followed the instructions step by step, but everything surrounding the sparks is just black. Did this happen to some of you as well? How did you work it out?
http://www.facebook.com/raphael.tomchinsky Raphael Tomchinsky

Nice tutorial as always, Andrew.

Just something I found while following the tutorial: if you set the “cylinder” shading to smooth, the particle lines that you mentioned will be gone without the need to add a subsurf modifier.

Thanks, and happy blending to everyone!
Theo Jaklitsch

Why is it that the properties window in your version of blender looks SO MUCH simpler than mine?

Theo Jaklitsch

Found it. It was because I didnt have it in cycles.

Finished Result

Reference Videos