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The title seems to have been cut off. It should read: Best practices for particle self-illumintaion? (geo-light vs. light instancing vs. point cloud driven lighting) Hey everyone, This explanation rambles on a little bit, so I'll sum up my questions at the end of the post and provide a simplified HIP that I'm working on: I'm about 1-2 months into Houdini and now I'm playing around with particles and trying to get some custom firework effects to work. I want to try and keep things procedural, so I'm using the DT cloudscapes tutorial to create the fireworks explosion smoke (particles with vdb). They're a bit stiff and steppy, so if anyone has suggestions on how I could improve the effect (or a better alternative) that would be great! I've also used a HIP I found to create custom explosion shapes based on goal geometry. Everything was working great until it came to the lighting tests. I want use the fireworks to illuminate the smoke clouds (reference: ) but I'm not sure how to go about creating self-illuminating particles that can light up the explosion smoke. My first instinct was to use the glow shader, but this didn't work at all, so I then tried the geometry light. This was ok, but I could only get the geo light to work on the out-of-the box fireworks. For some reason my custom fireworks won't take the geometry light... any thoughts? I've done some research and read about particle instancing lights (which might be the way to go because I can instance point lights) as well as using a point cloud to drive illumination. The point cloud option sounds really cool, so if anyone knows how i'd go about pulling this off I'd like to try it (the forum post that talked about this technique didn't explain how to do it, they just suggested doing it). Summary: 1a. My procedural smoke clouds are a bit steppy, any suggestions on how to make them flow more smoothly 1b. Also, is there a way to get it so when the clouds are birthed and die they dont' just appear and disappear? Like the volumes can grow and shrink? I'm guessing using a birth/age attr will do the trick, but i'm not sure how to set this up correctly. 2. The geometry light is only working on the out-of-the box fireworks and not my custom firework network. 3. Can I use particle instancing to attach a light to each particle? I've read a few places that this can be unstable, so are there better options? 4. How can I use a point cloud on a particle to drive illumination (if this is a viable option) Thank you! fireworks_geoLight_odforum.hipnc