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, Code Generation, Emitter, flash, Flex, Particle, Particle Emitter, Tweensy
