How to Make Smoke in Flash

There are a number of ways to animate smoke in Flash from realistic to highly stylized. The different approaches not only affect the look of your animation but affect how smoothly the animation plays back on older slower computers. A simple smoke effect takes minutes to create and plays back smoothly on any CPU.

Instructions

1. Draw a smoke shape with no stroke on the stage. You can use any tool, but the pen tool tends to give the most control over curves. Convert your smoke shape to a symbol (F8) making sure "Movie Clip" is selected as the symbol type. Double click on the movie clip to switch to the symbol editor window.

2. Insert a keyframe in Frame 2 of the shape's layer. Click in the frame and type "F6" (or choose "Keyframe" from the Insert menu Timeline submenu).

3. Shave your smoke shape from the top to make it smaller. You can select part of the smoke with the lasso if you painted, or use the "Delete Anchor Point" option if you created your shape with the pen. Continue to add keyframes and shrink your smoke (top down) until you've removed all of it.

4. Select all of the keyframes. Right click over them and select "Reverse Frames" from the context menu. This will reverse the animation so that the smoke grows rather than disappears.

5. Add a new motion sequence to the end of your smoke. Insert a new keyframe several frames farther down the timeline and a final keyframe another several frames away. Select the last three keyframes and choose "Create Motion Tween" from the Insert menu Timeline submenu. You should see arrows connecting the keyframes.

6. Animate the final effects. Select the next to last keyframe and use the Free Transform tool to skew and shift the smoke shape upward. Select the smoke object in the final keyframe and reduce the color alpha to 0 percent. Play the symbol animation to watch the smoke grow disperse and fade.

7. Add new layers to the main timeline. Drag copies of the smoke movie clip from the library to the different layers. Flip, scale and skew the different clips to vary their appearance. Start them in different frames to shuffle the smoke streams.

Tips & Warnings

• Flash CS3 allows you to apply a blur filter to movie clips, which can add a touch of realism to your smoke. Simply add the Blur filter in the Properties palette Filters tab and adjust the settings to the degree of feathering you want. However, blurring can slow down playback and your SWF file may not be compatible with older Flash players.

• Slow down or speed up your animation by changing the frames-per-second playback rate in the document settings (Command + J).

• If you can't see the shape's color properties in the Properties palette, click directly on the shape. The Properties palette should now show the shape properties.

• Movie clips loop in the timeline. If you would rather just have your smoke effect occur once, convert it to a graphic in the Symbol dialog instead.