This is all of the source frames for my FumeFX tests for Black Sun. They may be used individually or (as they were intended), compiled into sheets. I have included "yolo.psd" in which I spent an entire day trying to figure out how to make, that allows one to assemble the frames of a set.
Most sets are rendered to adhere to a 512x512 size 4x4 16 frame standard because I often encountered problems with animated sheets around 20 frames long. For Sins, I rescaled the final sheets down to 1024x1024 using Lanczos in xnview.
These are entirely hand made and rendered out of 3ds max. I'm not an artist, so color correction isn't my thing, and some of them aren't too great. But with a bit of work you can make amazing looking particles in sins at a fraction of the particle and performance cost of the defaults.
It is to this strategy that I owe the enormous performance boost that Black Sun: Retribution boasted over vanilla sins despite using many more guns and polies than vanilla and other mods.
You may use these in sins or other projects so long as A.) they are non-commercial and non-profit e.g. no donations, and B.) you provide credit to me (IskatuMesk). The research and creation of these was a very long-winded penis if I ever did choke on one.
http://gameproc.com/meskstuff/ret_devseries/FumeFX.7z (112mb)
I handed out an earlier pack to some people. This one has second-phase assets and is worth downloading again for them.
Example particle set made in about 1 minute in Retribution. This uses a total of 12 particles.
If I ever work on the project again I will produce many more sets of such frames, including high-density framesets for the UDK, which I may also release.
Good hunting.