Section 5 - Pyrocluster (Part 2)
Step 12: This is the single most important section of the whole tutorial.   Click and select the Pyrocluster object in the material manager. It will open the Globals tab of the Attributes Editor. Way down there, on Settings, select the Pre-Customized "Fireball" - We're going to use it as a template. Easy, huh? Well, not really - here's a closer look at the Globals tab and its many options:

The Globals tab of the Pyrocluster Material	The Volume is just that - The Volume of the texture. It's not related to the size of the effect, but the "fill rate" of the texture. The bigger the value, the stronger the presence of the resulting fireball. I don't think you'll need to play around with the Luminosity. It adjusts the brightness of the texture focused from its centre. The default setting is adequate in our case. Density could be replaced by "Transparency", and its functionality is rather obvious. Again, play with it to see how it works, as it can be rather fun. Color adjusts the colour of the particles. The far left of the slider represents the centre of the emitter, whilst the far right represents the outer regions.
The new configurations	Step 13: The Fireball preset is cool, but is far removed from the effect we really want to create. For example, the Color possesses far too many contrasts, and the red-wine shades just don't sit well with the idea of a flaming meteor.   With this in mind, alter the colours to resemble the image on the left. The RGB configurations I used (left to right) were 255/166/0, 233/106/0 and 0/0/0 respectively. Optional: At this stage you can try a render. Click the Play Forwards button in the Animation bar until frame 100 or so, and render to test the effect. The Play button
Step 14: Unless something has gone horridly wrong or you missed an important part of the tutorial, your render should show a MASSIVE orange glow.  This is caused by the enormous size of our particles, so go to the Shape Tab of the Pyrocluster Material. Once there, change the Radius from 100m to 10m.
Step 15: Your render should now show a long trail of fire. This is very cool, but we are still missing something rather important - Smoke, and the transition between the fire and smoke. Luckily, animating the Pyrocluster texture is ridiculously easy and requires no ability with keyframing or any other technique. Simply click on the Age tab and change the properties to resemble those on the left.   As with step 12, the options are explainable thus: The sliders represent a progression, where the far left is the frame where the Emitter's Particle Emission starts and the far right is where it stops. With exception of the Color Slider, these are greyscale sliders -  White represents the max value and Black the min value. Knowing this, we can already play around with the scales: The Radius will not change during the emission, so it remains solidly white. The Luminosity will be fading as the emission trails across the scene, so add a black mark in the Luminosity option to identify where the fire stops and the smoke begins. Color Mix affects how greatly the Color slider affects the particles. A black colour in the color mix negates the effect of the colour in the slider beneath (i.e. in this case, the white colour will not show), whereas white means the exact opposite.  Since we begin at full power, it will begin as black and then fade to grey as the smoke surges. Color sets the color that will be "Mixed". Since we want it to turn into grey as it becomes  smoke, you can set any greyish color here. I've set white since it also turns the colour into greyscale. And that is it. It's configured. Yep, it was that simple!   Well, maybe not THAT simple, but relatively easy nonetheless. Now just render your scene and you've got yourself a meteor!
Epilogue: I hope this tutorial has been useful. Pyrocluster is pretty confusing at the start, but gets easier as you use it.  I plan to make another Pyrocluster tutorial (an advanced one) soon, but everything in due time...  By the way, it's already 01:33 am here, which means I'm 17 by now! Time sure goes fast when you're having fun! Anyway, if you want to drop me a message, constructive criticism, suggestions or, even better, ideas for a new tutorial, my e-mail is kaliath@-nospam-uol.com.br, where -nospam- is removed by yourself.  Or you can just leave a message via the Biorust Forums PM system.  Happy hunting!

- Tutorial written by Elentor

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