I took part in this project for making transition FX between cars.
Particles for the transition FX made with POP Advect Field using Velocity Field that I made manually with curve sop. It's quite simple tech but powerful and procedural.
The softwares I used are mentioned below.
Tracking : 3DEqualizer
FX and Lighting : Houdini
Rendering : Redshift
Nuke : Compositing