Realistic flames/smoke...anyone done them?

programming flash
1

I am in the process of designing my new Flash based website and wanted to have some fire and smoke in the certain parts. They will be important to the mood of certain scenes and I was wondering what the best way might be for doing it. The site interface and design will be traditionally painted and scanned in, then the animated elements (like the flames, smoke, magic effects) will be put on top of that. I could hand animate frames for the smoke and flames but I don’t know how to make the edges partially transparent as smoke would be. Any help is much appreciated.

Here is a QUICK color mockup of the main page of the site. This is just the sketch of the main page scanned in and colored very quickly in Photoshop:

LittleFenris.com v.01

Each of those buildings/sites will also be a button to take you to each of the gallery sections. This will be a portfolio site for my illustration and design work. When you click on either the buttons on the bottom, or the corresponding buttons it will take you to a closeup or interior scene of that building and that is where the campfire/torch light will be needed.

2

I found this program called Particel Illusion. Amazing. Free 30 day (or so) trial. Might lag a little in flash if you don’t do a trace bitmap… maybe thats just me.

3

Thanks for the suggestion, I’ve actually got Particle Illusion 3 (amazing program BTW). What format would I need to save the animations as to get transparency (or the alpha channels) to work? Wouldn’t trace bitmap destroy the alpha channel and transparency?

4

I think if you save as .png you’ll keep the alpha channels, and I don’t think trace bitmap will destroy them because using the mixer you can have a semi transparent fill color.

5

Thanks, I’ll give the PNG a try.

6

.png’s are great, they can make your file a bit big though if they’re big in size or there are lots of them. They look nice though. That’d look better than drawing it with vectors.

7

Yeah, I’ll give that a try. This is a portfolio site so hopefully people will realize it may be a bit bigger than most sites because its graphics intensive.

8

hi little fenris, love the artwork but you need to make the email icon match up with the rest of the illustration (it looks out of place)

9

where did you get particle illusion 3?

10

Yeah, the entire site will be traditionally illustrated and scanned in so that email icon will match up with everything in the end. I did it in 3D to get the look I wanted, then I’ll illustrate from my 3D image.