CS Effects Quick Start Guide

Using CS Effects is essentially accomplished by opening a new Flash movie, loading your picture background, dropping CS Effects tokens where you want to generate smoke and fire, and then customizing the smoke and fire with slider bars. This quick start guide will review these steps in detail to get you going!

Step 1. Start a new Flash document. Once you open Flash, choose New... Flash document from the initial screen.

Step 2. When the program opens to reveal the Stage, use the menu item File > Import to Stage... and go find a JPG or picture to load into the background. The picture should be somewhat small, but later you can resize your pictures to fit your Stage.

Step 3. Open the Components panel by choosing Window > Components. You will see folders when this panel opens, and you should click on the plus sign next to the word CommandSim. This folder contains the CS Effects extension, which is our smoke and fire generator.

Step 4. Click and drag the CS Effects token onto the Stage, into whatever position you want to use as the base of the smoke.

Step 5. Save your movie by going to File > Save. It will prompt you for a file name and place to save the movie. Save it anywhere you'd like!

Step 6. Product your movie by choosing Control > Test Movie. Your first movie with smoke!

Step 7. Now let's see how to change the smoke pattern. With the CS Effects token selected (a thin blue line appears around it), open the Component Inspector panel by choosing Window > Component Inspector.

Step 8. You will see the user interface for CS Effects in the Component Inspector panel. If the panel is too small, move your cursor to a corner of it and click-and-drag it to enlarge the panel. If the panel is stuck on the side, click-and-drag on the dots next to the title, Component Inspector, and drag it away from the other windows.

In the Component Inspector panel, click on an arrow next to a folder and then click on one of the entries. This sets the effect to that pattern.

Step 9. If you changed the effect pattern, test the movie by clicking on Control > Test Movie. Alternatively, you can press the TEST MOVIE button on the CS Effects user interface (left side).

Step 10. You can edit the pattern with the conventional VOLUME, VELOCITY, DENSITY, COLOR by clicking on the EDIT tab, and then moving a slider. If you want to modify more parameters, click on the ALL SETTINGS tab, and then into a sub-panel (such as WIND, PARTICLE, COLOR, etc.)

At this point you should be comfortable enough to add some more tokens or just play around with the settings. Make sure to save your file periodically. Good luck!