How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS4

Smoke with Gradients

THERE ARE SEVERAL ways to animate smoke and each technique is based on the style of the smoke itself. Do you need your smoke to be a cartoon style smoke cloud? Maybe you want a more realistic billowing of soft puffy clouds? How about a very stylized smoke effect with curling hard-edged shapes simulating the basic movement of smoke? There are many different ways to achieve the same results in Flash – whether it’s with ActionScript or animation. Flash has always been a blank canvas for us to express ourselves on. Let’s take a look at a few ways to approach the dynamics of the elusive smoke cloud.

 

1 Create a radial gradient ...