Creating a Falling Snow Effect in Flash 8

Intermediate to Advanced                1 2

This tutorial features the use of randomly generate numbers to control size, starting position, speed, sideways movement and opacity to give a snowfall full of movement and variety.

Step 1: Setting Movie Properties

This tutorial creates a typical banner sized illustration (468 X 60) but the directions can be modified to make snow fall in what ever size of movie you want. You will just need to change the numbers in a couple of variables.

Start by setting the movie properties. Open the movie properties dialog box by double-clicking in frame rate label just under the timeline and set the movie proerties to:

• Width 468
• Height 60
• Frame rate 20
• Set the background color to something other than white.

Step 2: Creating the Snow Flake Symbol

This one symbol will be the basis for all the snow in our movie.

Create a new movie symbol - Choose Insert > New Symbol or Ctrl + F8. Then name the new symbol flake and choose Movie Symbol as the type. This will bring you into symbol editing mode.

Create a snowflake using the type tool - set the font to Webdings + type in an uppercase T approximately 18 - 24 points (as this is a banner sized movie I want fairly small snow - if you are creating a bigger movie make the snow correspondingly larger).

To add variety to our falling snow we are going to create a whole bunch of different snowflakes. Add a keyframe in frame 2 of the flake symbol timeline by placing your cursor in frame 2 and clicking F6.

This will create a copy of the snowflake text object in frame 1, choose Modify > Break apart to convert this to a shape and then modify it in some way - for example by adding circles to the ends of the points.

Add a blank keyframe to frame 3, Right-click in frame 3 of the flake symbol timeline and choose insert blank keyframe from the context menu or use the hot key F7.

Click on the onion skinning button so that you can see a ghost of the previous frame then draw a new snowflake approximately the same size using the line and shape tools. In this step we are going to create a snowflake from scratch.

I found it easiest to draw just one line of the snowflake with the line tool, decorate that line with other lines or shapes and then group the lines and shapes (Ctrl + G (win) Cmd + G (mac) or Modify > Group), copy and paste the new line and rotate it into position using the free transform tool.

Using the onion skinning feature to reveal the ghost of the shape on the previous frame makes it easy to correctly line up the lines that make up the snowflake shape.

Using the technique of your choice create 3 more keyframes each with a different snowflake so that the flake symbol has a total of 6 frames.

Step 3: Create the Falling Snow Movie Clip

Next we need to create another movieclip to enclose the flake movieclip symbol, this enclosing symbol is what we will attach the actionscript to that will make the flake appear to fall.

Create a new movie symbol - Choose Insert > New Symbol or Ctrl + F8. Then name the new symbol fallingSnow and choose Movie Symbol as the type. This will bring you into symbol editing mode.

From the library drag an instance of the flake symbol onto the fallingSnow symbol stage. Select the flake symbol and give the instance the name snowFlake.

Step 4: Add the FallingSnow Movieclip to the Main Stage

Use the breadcrumb trail at the top of the timeline to return to Scene 1. Then drag an instance of fallingSnow onto the stage but position it so that it off the top of the movie background.

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