We are going to learn how to create a basic muzzle flash inside of Shake using no stock footage or pre-built examples. For this tutorial, I will be using Sapphire's Genarts plugin package for Shake (http://www.genarts.com). It is a great little package of plugins for Shake that output high quality results with extremely fast render times.
The beauty of Shake is its ability to work in a node-based format. It allows you to avoid doing things like "pre-comps" so you can easily work through your entire composite without ever leaving the script. The ability to change parameters upstream while viewing a downstream node is priceless as well.
The focus of this tutorial is to develop a look for a flash that can be procedurally generated and different every time by only using nodes found in Shake. With a little time spent on setup, we can easily make Shake do all of the annoying stuff for us by using expressions.
A word of caution: These things, since they are built in Shake, will have different results depending on the size of your project. A 2K image will react differently to parameters than a D1 image would. For this project, my resolution is set to 640x368.
Creating the Shape of the Flame
This is the part where you can use whatever image you want to get the basic shape of a flame. For this example, I have used a Rotoshape to click out a basic shape of a flame and used a Mult node to color it orange. There are a thousand ways to do this in Shake, but we'll use this one now for the sake of simplicity.
