So, I have a flame thrower based on a particle emitter. I would like the particles to cast light onto their surroundings, as it looks pretty dumb for the the fire not to light up its surroundings. I have thought about having a spot light following the flamethrower, but the flames can easily travel far afield from where the spotlight is pointing.
I believe I could just get the list of particles and place point lights at each of their positions, but that seems more intensive than I would like in multiple ways.
The easiest thing to do would be to instead generate 1 point light per meter that the flame covers and then animate those lights to somewhat match your particle stream.
You would also want to animate the color and intensity of the light for full effect.
I had originally thought you could apply an image filter to the camera using the alpha mask of the particles as they are output; but that seems a bit heavy handed and would only get you a glow effect in any case.
As your point lights get further from the source of your emitter; you will want to dramatically increase the radius of the point light while reducing the intensity. This will give you a soft falloff effect.