can anyone Tell me how to make a realistic burning fuse?
particles. try searching.
and I wouldn’t recommend that as a first project.
Try something like this:
http://www.vrotvrot.com/xoom/tutorials/Welder/Welder.html
You will be animating it it sort of a reverse direction since the fuse is going away instead of a line appearing.
Why would you think this is my first project?? 
I tried searching for fuses and came up blank and searching under particles is too general.
I did something like that for the first animation I did on my own (i.e. without tutorials). I think it’s similar to what you want. It’s the lamp movie at http://www.geocities.com/ajr650 under animations. You have to play it for about 20-30 seconds or so. The flex of the lamp acts like a fuse.
Basically how I did it was to extrude a circle profile along a curve. In Maya I was able to keyframe the extent of the extrusion so that the effect like a burning fuse was acheived. I don’t know if you can keyframe properties like how much a curve is extruded in Blender but I would hope so. You probably just link an IPO curve to it somehow.
As for the spark at the end, I attached a point light to the path curve used in the extrusion. You have to make sure that the IPO for the path animation of the light is exactly the same as the IPO for the extrusion otherwise the light gets away from the end of the fuse.
As for the glowing effect, I actually had something called a light fog that I placed around the point light. Again, I don’t know if you can do that in Blender. You might have to make a semi-transparent geometric sphere with some fog texture or something.
I didn’t bother emitting particles. I tried but it was difficult getting the right type of particles, direction, colour, emission rate, and lifetime. It might be easier to do particles in Blender but you should leave it til last. Just make sure you get the light sticking to the end of the fuse.
One problem you may have there is that point lights in Blender don’t cast shadows. I don’t know if this will be a big problem or not because the light doesn’t travel far anyway.
A big issue I had with using this method was that at some frames during the animation, Maya totally screwed up the extrusion (the flex/fuse just exploded) and I couldn’t fix it. It was to do with the type of extrusion I used - it may have been something to do with profile direction but the way Blender does this seems to be a bit better, so you might not have this issue.
You may still have a problem with the point light, though. In my animation, it kept flickering, even though it wasn’t near the end of the fuse. I would suggest trying to make a circular plane follow the end of the extrusion with a glowing texture and maybe emit particles from the surface.
I appreciate your help osxrules…I will let you know how it comes out
Yes, indeed. There will be a lot of interest in this. When you create your reply, treat it as a tutorial.
i think most importatnt is the right glow effect. i.e., the wire starts emitting light, goes red, orange, yellow, white (at this point the glow being strongest) and here it happens - the wire breaks, glow diappears. i’d make small pieces of wire that fall inside the fuse housing and turn dark very fast (as the glass is much colder and mucg bigger then they are, thus colling them down fast). then i’d make the broken ends look like balls (did you ever solder? you’ll know what i mean). maybe apply some dirty texture to the glass…
so, my two cents
>>>edit
one more thing: ne need for animating “reverse extrusion” or stuff - simply have two objects, one continuos wire and the broken/molten one and swap layers during animation.
Ahh, rats! So the Lucky Advemturer gets away this time… 
…
But at least you won’t have to model an explosion. 
I made a fuse type animation using a simple white/black mask for the fuse wire - sort of limited the fuse wire orientation.
http://www.telusplanet.net/public/kugyelka/fuse_divx.avi
(~ 800 kB)
It’s not too good. I didn’t spend much time on it.
I could post the blend, if you’re interested.
It’s good enough!
Post It!
Here you go:
http://www.telusplanet.net/public/kugyelka/blender/files/test_fuse_17.blend
You’ll need to add the alpha mask on the second texture channel for the fuse wire. It’s just a half white(top)/half black(bottom) ‘alphamap.tga’ image file.
Are you talking about animated textures? I was going to suggest that later when I remembered the cube movie someone posted. That looks a bit like a burning fuse. I think he explained how to do it on his site too. I can’t remember the link, though. It was a cube that rotated on a book and the surface burned away.
I wouldn’t recommend doing it the way I did it solely based on the fact that my extrusions messed up. Also, with animated textures, you can get away with using a lower resolution model without seeing artifacts. Also, you can make the ends of the fuse rugged to give it a less CG look. I only did the reverse extrusion because my camera was far away from the wire and I didn’t know about animated textures at that time.
Solmax, I didn’t follow you when you mentioned glass or the small pieces of wire. Where is the glass in a fuse?
Umm, who is the lucky adventurer?