Snow

How to make snow

What good is a holiday animation without some snow? That is what I thought until I tried to create a snow animation that looks reasonably realistic. Most tutorials found throughout the net were either too complicated or not realistic enough. With that said, I decided to try my hand at re-creating falling snow. Hopefully, this tutorial will help you to add a cool snow effect to your animations.

	Quick Update
This version of snow is only for Flash MX. Updated versions of this tutorial can be found for the apppropriate Flash/AS version below: HTML / JS Flash CS4 / AS3 Falling Snow 3.0 Flash MX 2004 Version

The following animation is an example of what caffeine and a thrilling re-run of Charlie Brown's Christmas Special can do:

[ it's snowing....in the small box on your screen ]

You will create something similar to the above animation by following the instructions in this tutorial.

Creating Snow:

1. Create a new movie in Flash MX. Set the width and height to anything you want, and make sure you set the frame rate to 25 for smooth playback. You may want to have a darker colored background for the white snow to be visible.
2. Now, it is time to draw a particle of snow. Click the Oval tool (the circle icon) from your toolbox. Select a white color from the color palette. Ensure that the circle does nothave an outline. Draw your white colored circle anywhere on your stage:

[ draw a white circle without an outline ]

1. Once you have created your snow particle, select it with your mouse pointer and press F8 (Insert | Convert to Symbol). The Convert to Symbol dialog should appear. Select Movie Clip and press OK.

[ convert the snow particle into a movie clip ]

1. Select the movie clip (which you converted in Step iii). Look down towards your Properties panel. Find the text field that says <Instance Name>. Click in that text field and type the word snow:

[ give the movie clip the instance name snow ]

1. Now, let's add some code to create falling snow. Right click on the movie clip and select Actions.

Copy and paste the following code into your Actions dialog box:

1. We are still not done adding actions. Right click on the first frame in your movie and select Actions. You will see another Actions dialog box appear - this time for the first frame.

Copy and paste the following code into the Actions dialog box:

1. You are almost done with this tutorial. The remaining sections involve customizing the animation and understanding why the animation works the way it does.

animations