Andrew Price takes a look at creating realistic sparks in Blender using the new Particle Info Node and rendering them with the blender Cycles engine. The new Particle Info Node can change the shader parameters of particles over time, such as the Age and Lifetime attributes of the particle are currently supported, but more particle data can be gathered as well.
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
Andrew Price shows how you are able to use the new Particle Info Node in Blender to control the particle’s changing color over time, and also shows how to render out the scene with some motion blur for a pretty sweet realistic look. Check out the tutorial for Creating Realistic Sparks Using Blender Cycles here.