Your first coin
Five steps, about five minutes. At the end you will have a coin that flies across the screen with a glowing tail, and you will know where the important controls live.
1. Launch something
Open the tool. A picture comes up first: three dinosaurs watching a meteor fall, its fire moving (made with the tool itself, in the Flow journey), the ChixyFX lettering and the version number next to it. It goes away by itself after four seconds, or click it. Next comes the start screen with four big choices; pick Coins and projectiles for this walk-through (Atmospheric, Flow and Win lines have their own pages). The header then reads Coins. Press Launch All in the panel header.
Coins fly from the small circles into the big coloured circles. That is the whole idea of the tool: something flies from A to B and leaves light behind it.
Now press Launch Selected. Only one coin flies - the one on the source point you have selected. Use this button from now on: one coin is much easier to judge than fifteen. (Want four or six rather than one or fifteen? That is Source count on the Board tab, and a bigger or smaller grid is Columns and Rows just under it.)
Tick Loop in the header and the tool keeps re-launching by itself. Every change you make then shows up on the next flight without you touching a button.
2. Slow it down
Drag the Speed slider in the header down to about 0.3x and launch again.
Everything is the same, just slower. This is how you see what a trail actually does: where it starts, how it fades, whether it lingers after the coin has gone. Most of the tuning you will do in this tool is done at 0.2x to 0.4x and checked at 1x.
To stop on one moment, press Pause and drag Scrub. After a Launch All it moves only the coin on screen and hides the rest until you press Play; keep pulling past the end of the slider to step to the next coin. See Reading the screen.
[first_01 - The playback row of the panel header: Pause button, Speed slider set to about 0.3x, Scrub slider. Red box around Speed. Panel width crop.]
3. Change the path
Open the Paths tab and drag Arc height up and down while looping.
The coin lifts higher or sags lower. Try a negative value and it dips below the straight line. Then try Duration: how long the flight takes from start to finish.
Those two - how curved, how long - are most of what a flight path is. Everything else on that tab is variation and fine control. See Paths: Coins.
4. Add a glow
Open the Trails tab. There is already one layer card. Open it and find Trail length.
- Drag it to 0.15: a short, tight comet tail.
- Drag it to 0.9: the glow smears along nearly the whole flight.
Then open the Over life group inside the card and look at Opacity over life. Drag the right-hand point to the bottom. The trail now fades out instead of stopping dead. That single change is the difference between an effect that looks finished and one that looks broken.
[first_02 - Two stage crops side by side, about 600 px each, same flight: left with Opacity over life flat at 1, right with it ending at 0. Caption bars: "ends abruptly" and "fades out".]
5. Save it
Open the Settings tab and press Save Settings. A file downloads.
Nothing in this tool is saved by itself. If you close the browser tab without saving, your work and every picture you uploaded are gone.
That file reopens with Open Settings, on any machine, complete with your pictures. The other button, Export Effect, is the one for the programmers: a zip with the settings and every picture the effect uses - see Settings tab.
Start from an example
The quickest way to see what a finished design looks like is to open one. Press Start over in the header, then Example gallery on the start screen. The cards are grouped by journey; a click on one opens that example right there, in its own journey, with its pictures and stage behind it. Press Launch All (or Trigger cycle and Trigger flow in the field journeys) and it plays.
Then take it apart: Mute one layer at a time to see what each one adds, and drag a slider to both ends. Nothing you change reaches the example itself; Save Settings keeps your own copy, and Undo in the header takes back what you broke. Back in the gallery returns to the four choices.
Some examples credit the artist who made them, a small line such as art by @alsqu. It shows over the card's picture while your pointer is on it, and at the bottom left of the stage while the example you opened is on screen. Click the name to open the artist's page in a new browser tab. The credit is only page text: it is never in a render, a save or the export, and it goes when you pick a journey or open another file.
[first_03 - The Example gallery over the tool: its title and Back button, then the first cards of the Atmospheric group, two to a row, each with its picture, journey tag, name and one line.]
[first_04 - One gallery card with the pointer on it (Shooting stars), its credit "art by @alsqu" showing over the bottom left of the picture. About 560 px wide.]
Opening an example replaces what is on screen, like picking a journey does. Save your own work first.
Where to go from here
- Controls you meet everywhere - the groups that repeat on every layer. This is the one that saves you the most time.
- Trails tab - more than one glow layer, ribbons, colours per target.
- Sparks tab - particles with gravity, wind and swirl.
- Recipes - finished examples to copy.
- Render PNG sequence - turn what you made into transparent frames for a demo video over real footage.
Two habits worth forming now: Solo a layer while you tune it so nothing else distracts you, and double-click a control name to put it back where it was. Both are on the shared controls page. And when a change goes wrong, Undo in the header (Ctrl+Z) takes it back.