I plan on getting Boris Red but have a question pertaining to Combustion 3.0. Is there anything you can do in Combustion that you can not do in Boris Red? Would it be redundant to have both?

I didn't know about Boris Red so I looked the product up, looks
pretty interesting! So I can't really comment on the differences,
but a big difference at least is that Boris Red seems to be a
plugin and Combustion is a standalone application (with support
for multiple rendering computers I believe?). Do make sure
Boris Red works (good) with your NLE.

Thanks. I'll be using Vegas. I was particularly interested in effects like fire, smoke, rain, snow, fireworks. Does anyone know if Boris Red or Combustion do these effects? Do they both do such effects?

Those effects are mostly done with particle engines and voxel
engines (smoke). Stuff like that is traditionally done with special
applications (nature simulators) or 3d packages like LightWave
and then composited in.

But depending on the compositing application it might offer such
things as well. I think I saw a demo for Boris Red on their
website (don't know if there is one for Combustion). So perhaps
you can check it out before buying?

"Particle Illusion" intrigues me, but apparently not many posters on this forum have tried it. Thanks again. Dale