I recently downloaded a copy of Partigen 2, the latest version of the outstanding particle engine by Desuade. To say that I’m impressed would be an understatement.

Not only is the engine now written in Actionscript 3 and available as open source code, the full paid-for version comes with an amazingly easy to use Flash extension panel which allows you to create particle effects in literally seconds. The smoking example above took less than a minute to create (not including the time it took to crop the photo and import it into flash).

So not only is Partigen now code friendly for developers, it’s also timeline friendly for designers. An inspired move by Desuade.

Another extremely useful tool (especially for code ‘dabblers’ like myself) is the option to create your desired effect inside the Flash panel and then export it as XML for future use in Actionscript. This is something I fully intend to utilise over the next few weeks as I play with Partigen. However, for today I decided to stick with getting used to the internal control panel.

The example below was created to see if there would be any performance problems with multiple emitters. It utilises a total of 5 emitters – one for the smoke (sat behind a timeline mask) and four different snow emitters set at four different depths. It took about 30 minutes to create, but to be fair it actually only took 5 minutes to set up and then I spent the last 25 minutes pedantically tweaking the effects to acheive my desired look (I warn you now, it gets pretty addictive).

I know that this example isn’t exactly pushing the boundaries, but I’d say that it proves that the engine can cope with the majority of every-day requests that clients might make.

I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve cringed at a client’s request of something like “I want a realistic fire burning, with lots of smoke coming off it and rain in the background”. These things always sound much easier than they actually are. Time can be a killer on things like that. Well, now it really isn’t a problem. With Partigen I could pull off that effect in under 10 minutes, with very little effort and quite a lot of style. Nice.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be spending as much of my free time as possible with Partigen to see exactly what it can do – and how easy it is to control with Actionscript. I want to try out custom emitters…and more interestingly moving emitters. Watch this space as I’ll post my findings as I go.