Passfire Labs, creator of the well known hobbyist pyro website passfire.com and producer of the top selling ShowSim simulation based scripting and choreography software, has released another product this month for the pyro hobbyist community.  The new software, called AfterGlow, brings all the simulation features of their high-end ShowSim 3D product at a price anyone can afford.  Helping to fuel a pre-existing movement by young gamers to choreograph amazing virtual fireworks shows using consumer games such as Roller Coaster Tycoon3, AfterGlow gives budding young pyro artists tools specifically designed just for making fireworks shows set to music-- tools every bit as powerful as those used by real pyrotechnicians!

AfterGlow's creator, Kyle Kepley, has been working with young show designers at http://www.vpyro.com/ for a few years while developing the ground breaking ShowSim 3D software for the professional market.  "The shows these guys make are just amazing.  Every bit as good as anything you would see from a real display company," Kyle notes, "not only are they good at choreographing fireworks to music, but they are very good at creating custom fireworks effects as well."  He believes the contributions from AfterGlow users will actually benefit the professional users as well. AfterGlow, like ShowSim 3D, has a highly customizable simulation engine.  Not only can you create your own custom effects and organize them into distributable libraries, but you can customize visual elements at the particle level and even add your own sound effects.  These custom "effect skins" can then be shared with other users as the community grows.  "After seeing what these young guys were doing with just a simple sim game not even designed for making fireworks shows, I knew I had to give them a real tool and tap their skills in a way that would benefit the professionals as well.  Some of these guys are already designing real fireworks shows now for other companies!"

While AfterGlow is missing a few key features that intentionally prevent it from being usable for real shows, such as printed reports, hardware exports and access to the time data  required to actually fire the show, all of the high-end features such as the 3D particle system, 3D perspectives, 3D models and 3D camera animations are included in the program.  In fact, many new features were actually added in AfterGlow which still need to be incorporated into the professional versions of ShowSim. According to the designer, "The AfterGlow interface is the new base that all the ShowSim versions will be rebuilt on.  I looked at the things that have worked and haven't worked over the last five years and redesigned the user interface for simplicity, ease of use, optimized workflow and removed things that were causing confusion or just were not necessary.  The database was also replaced to solve a lot of installation problems that people have been having over the years.  Going forward, all versions of ShowSim will be converted to use the 3D style effect models so that all AfterGlow and ShowSim users can share the same effect files between each other (show files between AfterGlow and ShowSim are not compatible however).

The user license agreement for AfterGlow forbids its use for commercial applications such as scripting shows produced for hire or producing sales demos for bidding on commercial shows.  It can still be used to script and fire personal shows that are not sold for profit, such as a backyard 4th show or a PGI show.   "It was a tricky thing trying to produce something that would give the hobbyist all the features they need without creating a low-cost alternative to the professional software that pays the bills around here" explains the developer.  "The professional fireworks scripting market is so small, even on the global level,  that there's just no way you can run a business selling these very specialized software applications for $50 or even $200 for that matter.  If someone is doing that, they are not going to be around for the long haul.  I've seen several of my competitors go out of business even with a $2000 price tag.  Scripting software is a one time sale with maybe an upgrade every few years.  I'd have to sell 100 copies of AfterGlow to make up for every lost sale of ShowSim 3D, so I had to be very careful with this project.  The hobbyist should not be effected by the features that were removed and can still use the software for its intended purpose- which is to make amazing virtual shows to play on your computer or upload to youtube." 

The realism of the AfterGlow graphics (which includes smoke, wind, wrap-around horizons and vivid glowing particles) also makes it an ideal tool for producing pyro graphics for websites, newsletter covers, convention badges and T-shirts.  Colors are more pure than what you can get off a typical video camera and you can produce the exact image that you want.  There is no background noise or smoke to interfere with the image and the pure black background makes for easy photo-shop operations.  Simply setup the scene you want in your picture, let the fireworks burst, hit the pause button and then do a screen grab.  Pyro hobbyists who build their own shells may also find AfterGlow to be a useful prototyping tool for testing the timing on complex multi-break shells or round star color changes before actually building them.

Vistit the AfterGlow website at http://www.afterglow-fireworks.com/ to learn more about it and download a free trial version.