Years ago I would have said custom coding. Not these days...I'll bet my hat that is a pre-canned effect from either a generator or one of the authoring platforms with built in effect engines (Swishmax, Koolmoves,etc). They can control every aspect with a simple GUI option choice (particle scale, velocity, fade time, etc).
Now I don't have a snowflake handy but you'll get the idea. Keep your mouse there, the effect will progress.....
To get the effect of different snowflakes they most likely nest two or three generator clips (using slightly different flake shapes) into one master clip that tracks the mouse.
Last edited by Chris_Seahorn; 11-19-2006 at 02:00 AM.
It's an extremely easy effect to pull off with minimal code. Here's an example I made for you. I've commented the important parts, but if you have any further questions, please let me know.
Thanks. That was fast! How about the other effect of the images showing up through that grungy background? The same agency did the same type of thing with this site http://www.lululemon.com/. The mouse thing gets annoying but the way the images show up is cool. How is that done?
They are two different effects. One applied to the mouse like Genesis showed you...another effect (a masked reveal) on the underlying image (I have a feeling he's gonna plop down some code so I'll save some time and leave it at that). He's rocking tonight
I can't keep up with you two! The "grungy thing" is on the Mt. Seymour site but they do the same type of effect with the "clover thingie" on the Lululemon site. It does indeed look like a mask effect but how do you make the mask "move" like that? I'm still a total newbie and understand masks but, so far, all I've been taught are static masks.
I still have my money on Swishmax or Koolmoves. I'm thinking that is not a flash site per se. Today there are tons of authoring tools that export as flash and you can't tell the difference but usually that many cheesy mouse effects spells low cost third party tool IMO. A lot of these effects are seconds away with a generator (why hand code what's pre coded...especially things like the masked reveals). Not to mention both of the packages I mentioned have over 250 pre-cans each.
Very cool Genesis F5! And far simpler than expected.
I will admit to being disappointed that it could be a third party generator though. That's a ripoff! These guys make big bucks...and they could be cheating. Crummy. Oh well, I'm glad to know how its done so I can be a puritan.
hahaha...well...Swish and the others smoke us on internal effects (the sheer amount of clickable GUI options for each effect is staggering) but they are all trapped in the world of AS1 (not to mention limited in many other ways) so we Flashers smoke them on power
I only own all the third parties because I supply sourcecode for them but otherwise never use them. Stick with Flash...advance Genesis's code example and you'll be the better coder
Here's a version that's a little more like what they use. I use alternating movie clips, all sharing one mask by taking turns with it. When the picture needs to change, I swapDepth them so the preloading movie is brought to the front and set the mask to that. It gives the illusion that it's multiple frames when in reality it's just two that keep playing that game you play with stacking your fists or whatever it is.
You can use as many pictures as you want. You can easily adapt this to read XML lists and you can set it up to load external pictures or even movie clips. Right now it just loads some low resource graphic files I threw together.
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