OK just for testing I used a background., this is not essential !!!

Now for the materials we need an environment object to show the pyrocluster

Here is the mat for the background

Perhaps I should have made the gradient the other way round, anyway do what turns you on

Now add the 2 pyro shaders, the vol tracer for the environment object and the pyro for..well the pyro

The environment settings have a huge impact on render times and to a lesser degree quality. for this exercise change to user mode and up the world step size to 30, you can lower it if you want but 30 is quite good especially for an animation

Now for the meat.. I will simply show you my pyrocluster settings

Note the alpha settings for the color are accessed by ticking the edit alpha box..duh !!!

Age effects are very important and I have not quite got the fire to fade correctly at the edges and on death. I often have this problem with pyro fire and am trying to work out how to get the transparency effect at the edges. Often fires look “composited” because of the dark edges

I ticked the use particle TM so that the pyro shapes rotate according to the emitter settings

Now this is an important page, I often don’t actually use lights for my pyro effects instead I use the settings here to self illuminate the pryo. Bump works very well