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Make a realistic smoke animation

In this flash animation tutorial we will try to create some realistic smoke, and make it act like real smoke.

First find some image with some fire, a match or a chimney or something that could produce smoke, then add that image as a background on the stage. you could lock the layer so you dont change anything later.

Now we will create the smoke, so first, select a light gray color, then with the brush tool start drawing a funny cloudy shape like shown below.

Right click and choose convert to movie clip, then go to the filters panel and give it a blur filter like I did.

You might also want to bring down its opacity (alpha) a bit to make it a bit see through.

Now make yet another smoke movie clip just like we did before. Just because its good to have variation, and all smoke doesnt look the same.

Now we are ready to do some animation to the smoke.

Put each smoke movie clip in each own layer in the layers panel, you can even name the layers smoke 1 and 2.

Now place both smoke effects at its start position (the tip of the fire flame), then create a new keyframe in the timeline at frame 25, drag the smoke up at the top where its going to stop. This should be done for both smoke movie clips.

Now select frame 25 and select the smoke movie clip, then set its alpha to 0. in the timeline for both smoke layers, right click between frame 1 and 25, choose motion tween.

In the timeline for smoke 2 layer, select all frames from 1 to 25, drag them out to start at about frame 12, so now the smoke 2 should first begin when smoke 1 is halfway up.

And we are done, you can make a couple of more smoke movie clips and animate them to make more variations like I did in the example at the top.