I inserted a blur in between the warps and the glows to soften up the flame a little bit, and then a Move2D node to scale the flame down.
Animating the Offsets for a Different Flame Every Time
You can go set the aSpeedX parameter to a high value. For my scene, i have it set to 1000. This basically controls the speed of the animation for the warp effect. When the value is set high enough, there will be a dramatic difference on a frame by frame basis. Another cool thing to keep in mind is that no matter where the flame is located.....the warp will be different. So no matter where you place your flame, the warp will be different.
Animating the Flash
One thing that I like to do is to make a "Master Fade" node. Then what you can do is copy this node around your script to activate atmosphere, dust,or anything else that needs to appear in sync with the flash. So to create this node, do the following:
1.) Create a Fade node found in the color tab. Copy the node, and the Paste Linked. The shortcuts for this are apple+c and then shift+apple+v. Inset this node under the Rotoshape node that you used to create the basic flame shape. Once this is done, you will see a purple line connecting the two nodes together.
Make sure you have Enhanced Node View set to ON. This is found under the Globals tab.
2.) Now you can animate the Master Fade node to your liking depending on what the shot calls for. This will control the linked node anywhere if is found thru the script. For a muzzle flash that is only visible in one frame of animation, it is best to have your keyframe interpolation set to Step.
This ensures that you don't have any odd fade outs that would give the gag away.
Creating Smoke and Some Atmosphere
Now it is time to go in and start adding a little more realism to the shot. We are going to generate some procedural smoke and dust elements using the Genarts Sapphire S_Textures plugin and the Shake Rand node. If you do not have Sapphire on your system, you can easily create a fractal pattern in any app you like and use that in place of the S_Textures node. We will control the opacity of this effect with the Master Fade node that we made earlier.
To get started, the first thing we will do is create a Rand node from the Image tab. This will create a basic random multicolor noise pattern that animates over time. This is what we will use to create the dust particles in the air.
1.) Go to the Image tab and create a Rand node.
2.) Change the Density parameter to something that creates a sparse layout of the noise. For this tutorial, I have it set to 0.0015 which gives me this result.
3.) Next I inserted a Monochrome node from the color tab left at its default settings. For those of you familiar with Photoshop (which should be all of you) this is similar to the Channel Mixer with the Monochrome box checked. You can toy with the settings in the Monochrome node to boost the red, green or blue levels to taste.
