Wind Effect - Particle System

This wind effect is accomplished through a small, simple particle system. It can be applied to any of your MovieClips or Sprites, and includes many settings to control how the wind is implemented, including:

• emitter: The emitter is a point (x, y) that represents where the wind is blowing from. You can change this point’s x and y positions at any time, thus animating the source of the wind.
• behavior: Controls whether the wind blows on infinitely, or blows to a fixed distance. These two values, respectively, are “grow” and “fixed”. The default value is “grow”.
• radius: If the behavior property is set to “fixed”, then radius determines the maximum distance the wind can blow. This can be any numerical value greater than 0, and is measured in pixels.
• speed: This is a numerical value greater than 0 that controls how quickly particles can move when blown by the wind.
• variance: The variance property allows you to add randomness to the wind. If your radius is set to 15, and your variance is set to 10, then your particles may in fact go as far as 25 pixels. This property also affects speed in the same way.
• friction: Friction controls the rate of slowdown on particles once they’re no longer being blown by the wind. It is a value between 0 and 1, and is multiplied against the particle’s speed. As such, if the friction is set to 0, then a particle won’t move. If friction is set to 1, the particle will move quite fluidly, as though it were moving on a slippery surface.
• smear: Smear is a boolean value (true/false) that, when on, causes particles to leave streaks (or smears) on the stage.

Play with the demo above to see how these settings change the wind effect. The wind effect is accomplished through the WindEffect class. You create a WindEffect object, passing it the object you want blown by the wind. Then you just add it to the stage and have it blow! You can control the wind’s blowing at any time, and also reset the object back to the way it was before the effect took place.

The help file that comes with your download provides more information on how to implement the WindEffect in your projects. And the FLA of the above demo is also included with full comments on how it was created.

This effect is written in AS3 and works for Flash Player 9+. Enjoy!

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