Cool Flash Effect Tutorials!

Summary

In this tutorial you will learn how to use the Smoke Effect (which is nothing less then a particle system / emitter) to create an effect that looks like a “starfield” effect.

Here the final result:

Requirements

Flash 8, Flash CS3 or Flash CS4.

Note: The screenshots in this tutorial are made in Flash CS3. It works exactly the same in Flash 8 or Flash CS4. This tutorial is a ActionScript 2 Project (although no ActionScript is required). This effect is also available as ActionScript 3 version.

Step 1 – Install the effect component

Download the Smoke Effect here. Please follow the install instructions and drag the component from the component panel into the libary of your .fla file.

Step 2 – Create shape Movieclip

With the rectangle tool you draw a shape with the size of the canvas on the first frame of the main timeline. The colour doesn’t matter since this only sets the size of the Movieclip and it will be invisible at the final application.

Convert this shape to a Movieclip and name it “shape”.

Set the instance name to “shape”.

Step 3 – Apply effect

Drag the effect component from the library onto the just created Movieclip. The component will snap automatic on the upper left corner.

Step 4 – Change effect parameter

Open the component inspector “Windows” -> “Component Inspector” and change the parameter according to the screenshot below.

Here the final result:

Step 5 – Play!

Now you can play around with the parameters to customize you effect. You can also use this effect with ActionScript. Find the full documentation here.

Download

Click here to download the fla of this tutorial. Note: The .fla includes the trial version of the effect component, which will only work in the Flash IDE (Flash 8, Flash CS3 or Flash CS4) but not inside the browser.

You can also download the Flash Smoke Effect Component here.

Here you can find a video tutorial of how to implement a different effect.