Kung Fu Panda 2 stylized fire effect

I was watching this pretty cool video of how some of the fire effects were created in Kung Fu Panda 2 using After Effects and Particular (link). After a lot of watching i figured out how it was made and set about recreating the effect - which I think came out really well.

As a lot of people were interested in it, I thought I'd share the AE file - it is made in After Effects CS5 using Trapcode Particular.

Download CS5 project file: playingwithfire.aep

Volumetric Smoke with Trapcode Particular

Particular Volumetric Smoke from Peder Norrby on Vimeo.

This was an attempt at creating a volumetric looking smoke effect. It was totally improvised so it shows how I experiment to get the settings right.

After rendering the final clip I noticed I had to change the Particle>Size over Life curve so the particles size faded out rather than just disappearing abruptly. I also setup Aux>Opacity over Life so the auxiliary particles faded out (using opacity). Tutorial:

Particular Volumetric Smoke Tutorial from Peder Norrby on Vimeo.

Download AE CS5 AEP