Creating the particle system

There are a couple of ways to create an explosion. The easy way would be to have a flow object scale up very quickly. This way looks OK but the problem with it is that it’s way too uniform. The better way and the way we will be creating it is with a particle system. This system will be the initial shape of the blast, so it’s important to get it right. If you have never used a particle system, don’t worry. We will go through this step by step and learn exactly what it takes to create one! So, open Blender and let’s get started:

1. First, let’s delete everything so that we have a blank scene to work with. Next, we need an object for the particles to emit from. Press Shift + A, select Mesh | Icosphere, and scale it down to 0.125. Make sure that you apply the scale as well. To do so, press Ctrl/Cmd + A and choose Scale.
2. To create a particle system, head over to the Particle System panel and click on the + icon:
...