It's extremely satisfying to take your beautifully crafted work and smash it to smithereens. In my last tutorial for Computer Arts, I explained how to set up a simple Flash particle system to make sparks and smoke. The system created its own graphical particles using Symbols in the library, and added simple movement and physics.
You're now going to use the same code (don't worry - it's in the support files) and extend it so that instead of creating each particle from a library instance, all the elements of a graphic on stage will be used as the particle graphics. This is exactly how we blow up the skeletons on the Plug-in Media homepage, and you can use this effect for your own projects. It's particularly good for adding that extra dynamism for games and interactive sites.
Special thanks to Dominic Minns, creative director at Plug-in Media, who created the artwork for this tutorial.
Click here to download the support files (842KB)