A while ago, I wrote a tutorial on how to create an explosion. Now, we’re gonna add a nice shower of sparks to the fireball. The starting point is the basic explosion from the previous tutorial, wich had one particle emitter for the fireball. Now, we’re gonna add a second emitter for the sparks. Here are the basic settings for the emitter:

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And now for the particle graph settings. The idea is to eject a short burst of small, glowing particles. That’s what the following two settings do. The particle life is set to 1.8 seconds, and the emitter will emit 1000 particles per second for 0.07 seconds, creating a burst-effect.

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Next, the particle size. This doesn’t change over the course of the particle life, but there should be some variation. For this, the X size is set to 4 and the X variation is set to 3. Since a fixed aspect ration is used, it’s not necessary to set the Y size.

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The speed of the particles is set to 20, and the variation to 10. Like the size, it doesn’t change over the course of the particle life (not through the Speed Life field, at least).

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The next step gives the cloud of sparks a shower-like appearance. First, the sparks fly a bit upward and then they start falling down. This is done with the fixed force parameter, wich acts as some sort of gravity. The Fixed Force Base field is set to -2.5, wich makes the force act upwards. The Fixed Force Life is set to increase the force to 2 after 0.2 seconds, making it act downwards so the sparks start to fall.

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And finally, the color settings. Red is set to 1, blue to 0 and green fades from 0.7 to 0.5 over the course of the particle life, making the color change from yellow to orange. The visibility goes from 0.8 to 0.2, making the particles fade away towards the end.

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If you want to see what it looks like or experiment with it yourself, you can download the file containing the effect and particle sprite.