KENT: Hello my name is Kent
I'm the creative specialist on the Google Web Designer team
and I'd like to show how to use the
Particle effects component
Here's an example of what you can do with particle effects
which is the type of animation
with lots of tiny objects and randomized
realistic motion
that's not really suitable for timeline animation
snow and
rain are examples
and they can be used to create some interesting video like effects
This example uses multiple particle effects
for the fire smoke and
stars
You'll find this in the Components panel
inside the Miscellaneous folder
Drag particle effects to the stage
now you can change the size and position
and with the Selection tool double-click to open the control panel
To get started
drag one of these presets onto the stage
We have snow and rain a few sizes
of fire and steam and smoke
I'll use snow
Now we see two bounding boxes on
stage
The heavy grey one is the size of the component we just said
and this blue
one is the particle emitter
That's the area in which the particles respond
They can be resized and moved but not outside the component boundaries
so if we want the snowflakes to all be created above our doc
we'd have to make the component
height a little taller
so I can move this emitter up
On the left I'll see
snow in the Layers panel
and I can drag in more presets
reorder, hide, and delete
them
Note when hidden the effects are not removed from your published document
they're just invisible but still consuming resources
so you don't want to
leave these hidden in your final files
I also have my regular Library panel on
the left
where I can access all items in my doc like images
but I would only add
them here
if that sandwiching is critical to my effect
otherwise it's
best to add background images
in the main timeline not this dialog
we'll have more control over scaling and binding
and get better performance
And on the right is my Properties panel
where most of the work is done
You'll also see some advanced settings
It's important to know these same controls exist for all presets
so you can start with snow
and adjust these values to end
up with fire or smoke
I can also change a
preset with this pulldown
we can control
the number of particles shown at once
and the minimum and maximum sizes of the particles
which start randomly between
these values and get bigger or smaller
depending on the size rate in the
Advanced Settings
For sprite we can select the particle object
and even set a custom image
now I can select one from my Library or Desktop
We also have speed
opacity and direction controls
At this point I'll preview to see the effect
and we can make changes here to see the results in real time
In the Advanced
properties we have the emitter fields
which just correspond to the emitter
size on stage
so I can set this to 50%
and now it's half as wide as the
component
Next their size rate and rate controls for color and opacity
These all adjust the speed of changing to the Min Max values
set in the basic properties
Positive values here will change towards the maximum
and negative values change
toward the minimum
with one of the default sprite selected
we can control the colors
the change rate
or randomized colors
Autoplay means the
effect starts immediately
but I could turn this off to control the effect
from a custom event on a button for example
Loop means the effect continually spawns new particles
Skip forward lets me begin with the screen filled with particles
rather than waiting for them to fill in
Acceleration can be used to create
gravity effects
and last are the turbulence controls
which should be used
with caution because they can lead to
overloading and low frame rates
Back in Design view if I click outside the stage area so nothing selected
I see the
autoplay duration
which is usually 30 seconds max for ads
but I can change it
or uncheck to play forever
so I'll save this
and back in my main timeline
one last thing I want to point out is I can mask these effects
if I right-click add
a gradient mask and change its direction
I can fade out the particles as they
fall
That does it for the Particle effects component
Thanks for watching!
