The Essential Guide to Physics for Flash Games, Animation, and Simulations

Creating animated effects using particles

One of the most common uses of particle systems is to create animated visual effects such as smoke and fire. In this section, we show you simple ways of producing some of these effects using physics-based animation. We start with a very simple example and then create a particle emitter that will allow us to create some more elaborate effects. The approach in this section is that we wish to produce animations that look realistic, but that don't have to be completely accurate.

A simple example: splash effect with particles

In this example, we will drop objects in water and then create a splash effect using particles. The objects will be balls of different sizes and will be dropped one at a time from the ...