This week on MacBreak Studio, I show Steve Martin from Ripple Training a few ideas for making particles “dance” in Motion.

The particle system in Motion is one of the applications' real strengths – and with the real-time playback engine, it's also a great deal of fun to design and manipulate particle emitters. You can use the huge number of included presets to quickly add fog, smoke, rain, snow, sparkles, fire, explosions, or many other types of natural (or unnatural!) phenomena to you projects. And since the presets are built on the same particle engine, they can be easily adjusted to fit your needs.

In this episode, we use a preset emitter simply as a starting point to create a very different end result. Starting with a simple sparkler type of effect, we create a fountain of sparks. Then, we use Motion's powerful parameter behaviors to change the animation even further. By combining particle emitters and parameter behaviors, you can create just about anything you can imagine.