Free Flash Tutorials - Cigarette Smoke Effect

Today we're going to look at a really easy and simple way to make some good looking smoke. I'm not talking huge atomic smoke clouds, but more like smoke that would come out of the barrel of a gun, or a cigarette. In this example, it will actually be a cigarette. You could quite easily draw a cigarette in Flash or Photoshop, but for this tutorial I used an image from the internet. If you would like to see an example of what we are going to create, click here.

Here is the image I used. If you want to use it for your animation, save it to your computer and import it into Flash.

Add the cigarette to layer 1. Rename it "bg" or cigarette" so you know what is what. Create a second layer, and call it "smoke". Guess what we're putting on this layer? That's right, the smoke. So, select the Rectangle Tool, and draw a grey rectange at the end of the cigarette, like so:

Doesn't look much like smoke at the moment, I know. Next, select the Eraser Tool, and erase certain parts of the rectangle. This part will make the smoke look much more realistic when we come to the next part. Once you have erased certain parts of the rectangle, you should be left with something like this:

You may be wondering what is going on, at this point, but don't worry, all will be clear. What you need to do now is select your rectangle, or what's left of it, and convert it to a movie clip, by clicking it, and pressing F8. Call it anything. Next, we need to apply the blur to your movie clip. To do this, select it, and enter the Filters tab at the bottom. Click the small blue "+" sign and add a blur. Set your blur to match the following:

Now you will notice the smoke looks alot better.The reason we erased the parts of the rectangle was to create a different texture in the blur. If you never erased any part of the rectangle, you will notice a large solid rectangluar blur, that doesn't look like smoke. Your smoke should look something like this now:

Now it's time to animate it. We want the smoke to raise up from the cigarette, than fade out. It probably doesn't fade out in real life, it's likely that the smoke continues, but for the sake of this animation, we're going to make it fade out after a few seconds. So currently your smoke will be in the first frame, just sitting there. You will want to change the frame rate. I set mine to 35 frames per second to make the animation look nice and smooth like smoke does. Add a keyframe to frame at frame 75 on your smoke layer. Now go back to frame 1 and drag the circular point, from the middle of the smoke, to the bottom (still in the middle). This will help when using the free transform tool. It simply means that when you rotate or stretch the rectangle, it will move around this circle that you have positioned.

Now lets select the Free Transform Tool. At keyframe 1, we want the smoke to be small. When you click on your smoke with the free transform tool, you should see the following:

With the circle positioned at the bottom. Use the top middle square to make the smoke rectangle smaller. We want to make it small so it looks like it is coming from the cigarette, rather than just appearing there. Once you have done this, your smoke rectangle should look like this:

Now go back to keyframe 75. Your smoke should be the full size, looking normal. Right click anywherein between the two keyframes, 1 and 75, and create a motion tween. To do this, right click the layer and select Create Motion Tween. Now if you play your movie, the smoke will look as though it is coming from the cigarette. To make the smoke look better, add a new keyframe to frame 90 (remember you need to keep adding frames to your cigarette layer too, otherwise it will disappear). Use the free transform tool again to increase the width and height of the smoke a little bit. Create a motion tween in between 74 and 90.

To finish off, we're going to make the smoke fade out. To do this, create a final keyframe on frame 130. Use the Free Transform Tool one final time to increase the width and length (to make the smoke look as though it is fanning out). Now, select keyframe 130, then select the smoke with the Selection Tool. Now you will see the Properties menu change, incorporating a "Color" drop down box. Select Alpha from the drop down box, and adjust the percentage bar to 0%:

You have now completed the smoke effect. Remember, we are not going for total realism, just a simple and easy way to make smoke. If you have any problems with creating this effect, do not hesitate to post on the KnowFlash Forum. The final effect can be seen here (Note: The example file could be stretched resulting in bad quality animation)

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