I’m tired, so I’m going to keep this quick. The Emitter class by Tweensy is fantastic and fun to use, but it’s not easy to imagine what an effect will look like without coding up an example.
That’s why I’ve put together a publishing tool for Tweensy’s particle Emitter. I’m using 15 sample particles embedded in a SWF, which you can download here. Launch the editor here.
Some features of this editor include:
- The ability to save configurations to a file to be loaded again later (serializing the data to AMF and reading it in to restore state). This means your designers can fiddle with the animations and then email you the configuration.
- A code generater for each Emitter and each BitmapFilter applied, which means you can load up the configuration the designers sent you and pretty much copy/paste the code into your project.
I will update to add more effects, like the PerlinDisplacementEffect that helps with the really cool fire effects Tweensy is capable of, but for now this is what I’ve got.
Once you add an emitter, you’ll need to set at least the emission frequency, emission randomness, and particle life to see anything happen. After that I suggest moving the X/Y coords and turning on either the Blur filter or the ColorTransform filter. Changing the start and end colors does some dramatic things, as well as fiddling with the blendMode (I suggest either Normal or Add). If you’ve got any questions or feature requests, leave them in the comments. Good luck!
Update: Here’s two sample emitters to start off with: Effect 1 and Fireworks (right click and “Save as…”, keeping the .amf extension).
Update 2: Added the PerlinDisplacementEffect. Try it out!
Tags: BitmapFilter, flash, Flex, Tweensy
Great! I cant thank you enough for this editor, its an immense relief. Exactly what i actually need to speed up my process.
thank you for your effort and for sharing this tool! :D
What would be very useful (at least for me) is the option to attach the emitter to the mouse to see whats happening for different/dynamic movements.
Just in case you are the mood to continue this nifty thing :)
greets
Well, what also would be great if you could update it to work with the actual version of Tweensy. When i try to use the actionscript code from the editor, I got alot errors for argument count and stuff… for me its hard to figure out what to fix.
I also wonder how “@Embed(‘particles.swf#Nova’)” can act as emitter Class, i get ” 1041: Attributes are not callable.” for it.
In case it would work, how do I set up a flash document, to get that kind of swf, containing the images for my effects?
I´m sorry for these noob questions, I´m more an artist than a programmer…
Any help would be very appreciated!
greets
Froyd,
Thanks for your comments (and yeah, comments are moderated;) ). This was really a weekend project for me, but people have expressed interest in seeing a more advanced editor (on par with Ryan Swanson’s excellent regex editor). I’ve thought about it, but I’m committed to so many things at the moment that it’s difficult finding time to do something meaningful on it.
About the library, I’m using TweensyFX 0.2.2. I’ve extended a few of Shane’s classes though. I tried to keep his core library untouched, though I may have made a few changes. The property rotationDegreesPerSecond does not exist on Shane’s Emitter class.
If you are working within Flash, you shouldn’t use the Embed metatag, you can instead import the particle assets, export them for Actionscript in the library, and reference them from the timeline.
If you have questions, you’re always free to post your code or a link to pastebin and I can have a look at it.
Again, thanks for the feedback.
Paul
Yo Paul cant stop playing with this nice tool, just wanted to say thanks, i never got into tweensy becauze i never had the option for those effect in projects, what i am building now is for my gf she works with less enabled people, three or 4 times a week they get to go into a room, and just chill to relaxed music with a beamer so i decided to make something for her instead of beaming an avi
Please keep me updated, i am trying to make an air version of it so i can easily manage the stuff in sql
anyways thanks btw the common.swc is missing so i need to use the fx version.
btw i want to use a bytearray for the effects can u give me some pointers