This is what I found out from brycetech tutorials on explosions and fire. on explosions: basically the actual explosion would be a sphere textured simarily to that used in brycetechs fire (and ice demo) that brightens then fades at an appropriate rate. (for more info see brycetechs explosion demos.interesting.) on Fire: I tried the "fire and ice tutorial" from brycetech. - good but not animated. to animate try this: NOTE: you will need to read the fire and ice tutorial and download clayfire texture from the link within that tutorial within brycetech.com. (I tryed going straight to Clay's website and could only find his pictures of his friends and family.) 1: make one sphere and use the clayfire material you added to your materials library turning recieve and cast shadows (in material editor) off. 2: half bury the sphere in the ground. 3: make keyframes at 0 seconds, 1 second and 2 seconds. 4: go to 1 second key frame on main window of bryce and elongate size in Y direction.(try a factor of 1.5.(if it's 20 make it 30. )) 5: make sure 0 second and 2 second keys are original size. 6: go to the material editor and offset y in the editor(left button at top) by the original size of y at second 2. (*) 7: make sure offset of y is 0 at frame 0. 8: check ok check mark to exit materlal editor. 9: animate. simple! after checking this out you might add more fire spheres, elaborate as in the "fire and ice tutorial" etc. NOTE: remember that this is a linear rise and fall of the fire. you might want to add keyframes to modify rise and fall rates. also you might want to check to see if the last frame duplicates the first.(it won't. if you figure out how to do this please post.) *I am under the assumption that because you are using the random option that there is no way to loop the animation sequence without a gap in the motion.(in other words the offset never repeats in a predictable manner within a reasonsble number of frames.) if this proves to be wrong, please post.