Trapcode Particular – Auxiliary Particles

Trapcode Particular has the ability to spawn auxiliary particles from the main particles. To enable this option, open the Aux System tab in the Particular Effect and set the Emit property from ‘Off’ to ‘Continuously’.

If you play back the clip now, you will see your blue fireworks particles continuously emit new, rainbow coloured particles. This is getting really trippy, but once again, not really what we are after.

First off, I only want these particles to be emitted during the very end of the fireworks, just as the blue sparks are fading away. Trapcode Particular allows you to configure at which point in the particle’s lifespan they emit the auxiliary particles. You can find this option in the Control from Main Particles tab under the Aux System. I set mine to 65% and 70%, which defines a short span of time towards the very end of the fireworks effect.

Now the fireworks effect starts out normal and then, just as the particles are fading away, they start to emit the rainbow coloured auxiliary particles.

Just like you can for the main particles, you can change the behaviour and the appearance for the auxiliary particles. I decided to decrease the Life property to .5 as I only want the sparkles to be visible for a short time.

I also increased the Velocity to 1000 to have the particles being emitted with a lot of force to make them look a little more realistic.

In order to not have the auxiliary particles fly way off screen due to the high velocity, go into the Physics tab in the Aux System and increase the Air Resistance property. This will apply friction to the particles and slow them down after the initial birth event.

Finally, I also lowered the Size of the particles to 2 as I wanted the little sparkles to be fairly subtle.

Play back your composition and you will have the normal blue fireworks effect and towards the very end, a large amount of tiny sparks should be emitted.

Now I didn’t want rainbow glitter so I went to the Color over Life property for the auxiliary particles and set the colour to a solid gold. I also configured the Size over Life property to continuously decrease so the little sparkles slowly fade away.

If you play back the effect, you should have a cool looking blue fireworks effect with some glitters towards the end!

One thing I noticed was that the main particles were a little bit hard to see towards the end when the gold glitter was emitted so I went back to the main Particle tab in Particular and set the Size over Life property to be constant. I wanted to keep their size pretty big and instead set the Opacity over Life to decrease. This made the glittering of the main particles at the end of the effect more obvious.

Feel free to tweak as you please. Finally, let’s look at adding a small launch particle trail to the fireworks effect using Trapcode Particular!