Many users may not be aware that it is possible to use SWiSH Max4 to author custom effects such as the one shown below. A custom effect can be based on any of the ten core effects. Custom effects use a Custom interface to offer a specialized user interface that is easier to use than the underlying core effect interface tabs.

The Custom interface for the “Rainbow bulge” effect is shown below. This exposes five parameters instead of the 30+ parameters associated with the underlying Transform effect.

An authored effect can  support up to nine Custom parameters. If more control is needed, the original parameters associated with the core effect can be presented in additional tabs.

The sample effect, “Rainbow bulge”, has five custom parameters. In this example, the parameters associated with the core effect (Transform) have been hidden from the end user.

The remainder of this article demonstrates how the above effect was authored. Once understood, the technique can be applied to allow authoring of a virtually unlimited number of custom effects. (more…)

Craig Lowe from Loweonline has made a great tutorial describing how to create a realistic flowing water effect with steam. Craig has described the sequence in an easy to follow step by step sequence with lots of screen captures.

The tutorial can be found here. I hope you enjoy his article.

A while back we demonstrated how to make a magnifying glass using simple masking. Although this masking technique works very well, it cannot be used to simulate fish-eye type lenses or other lenses that result in distortion of the image.  Using the Flash 8 displacement filter, we have created a new component that simplifies the creation of lenses that show distortion.

The lens outline can be made invisible which allows the user to distort areas of an image in a seamless manner. The image below is an example of such distortions. The left most image is the unaltered image, the middle image shows its head expanded using a magnify lens and the right most image shows its head reduced using a reducing lens.

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Make your text ‘write’ across your movie created from swirling particles, or dots. This is a great new component effect which is easily customised.

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This SWiSH Max2 project demonstrates how to make a magnifying glass effect that allows a section of an image (or movie clip) to be shown in ‘magnified’ detail. Try it by dragging the “magnifying glass” to the area that you wish to view in more detail.

The project demonstrates a number of useful concepts including:

• use of a pre-loader
• startDrag and stopDrag
• masking
• use of the library (sorry, the content library is not available in SWiSH miniMax2)

The project .swi can be downloaded from here: magnify_snowgums.zip

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