I’m a newbie, and am gonna ask a lot of retarded questions, soooooo… does anyone know how to make gunfire (like the flash at the end of the barrel) using blender? I’m new to pretty much all concepts so, you know.
You can use either a particle system emitting for a short period of time or a mesh with halos and an alpha IPO.
If that’s not clear, don’t be afraid to ask.
You gotta love Theeth…always willing to help out.
Here’s a link to a tutorial about particles:
http://kahuna.clayton.edu/~jbrooks/blender/tutorials/volcano/
I need to read it myself because I haven’t worked with them yet, so I did us both a bit of good by finding it 
If you need more tutorials just check out the tutorial list at the top of this forum. Its an invaluable resource So is theeth!!
I think particle systems will work fine for bullet hits, but for the muzzle flash I would use planes with appropriate transparent textures.
Here is a link that shows the principle, and easily be used in blender, but you must learn the techniques in blender first.
http://www.hockeyhaircut.com/Tutorial/MuzzleFlash1.htm
If you are new to everything, you should play around with transparent textures and texturing in general before getting a cool gunfire effect.
Ah, and the IPO curves should be in your repertoire as well, unless you want a permanent muzzle lamp on your gun. 
i think the best way is combining these 2 methods by having a mesh that is the shape of your desired muzzle flash and have vector particles come from the vertices of that base mesh and then add some motion blur and it should look pretty good.
Hi !
Muzzle flashes have a very short duration of 1 or 2 frames at 25 frames per second. There is no need to do a true animation on 2 frames. The best thing to do is to draw the flashes in a 2D software, and add them in postproduction with your video editor.
But if you want the animation to be automated (long firing of a machine guns) you can make a material with an alpha layer and apply to it a texture that you will draw in a 2D soft. You will have to create different shapes, because all the flashes are not the sames, though. There is some random in fire.
I think that the simples way is to make several objects for the flames, and make them appear quite in random, with Ipo curves set to LAYERS.
The flames will be hidden on a non selected layer and will appear on an active layer for one frame, according to the sound effects track.
If the scene takes place inside you’ll have to add an ipo curve on the Emit reflectivity or specular parameters of the walls an some objects materials close to the gun, in synchro with the muzzle flashes to fake reflections.
Philippe.
I was looking for some solution a while back and its really hard to find good pictures of muzzleflashes on the net to alphamap, so i ended up making it with two particle emittors: (plug)
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22509&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30
Yeh, theeth is about as much help as the encarta encyclopedia, gives you all the answers and no details
Particle system is probably the best, the blender manual has a lot on it:
http://www.blender.org/modules/documentation/htmlI/c9291.html
Even though it’s for version 2.3 it still covers all the basics so should be of help.
Mystery
if he gave details, we would all feel insecure. 