d.c.Holth

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending my first FlashBelt conference and had a great time! If you ever get the opportunity to attend, FlashBelt is definitely worth it!

Seb Lee-Delisle gave a great presentation on Particles for the Non-Physicist. I have worked a bit with particles on my own, but never really understood the possibilities of what a particle system could do. Seb pointed out all the spots on the Plug-in Media website that have particles - way more systems going on there than I expected.

I had a chance to speak with Seb after the session as to how he made the merging borders around the cartoon smoke effects and dripping ooze (from the Plug-in Media main page). He said you needed to have multiple layers of particles. So, when I got home, I downloaded the demonstration files and got to work. Below you can see the results. Its a really cool effect.

The important thing when creating the two layers of particles, is that each layers of particles must have matching properties - only the linked movieclip is changed. You can see that the background particle is darker and larger than the foreground, but they move and grow in unison. This allows the background particle to be the border around the lighter front particles and merge together seamlessly.

My next step is to figure out how to use a particle system to make a MovieClip appear on fire. If you’ve seen my fire effect code, it uses a computationally-heavy method of duplicating, distorting, coloring and fading the MovieClip. I think the particle-system effects could be used to create the fire instead.