Any advice on creating a custom particle system?

Hi all,

I've been lurking here for a long time, and have now decided to sign up! Thanks for the great community and resource.

here's my situation:

I'm trying to create a bunch of dandelion seeds that would be blowing across my screen. I'm assuming I would use some sort of particle generator and then assign a custom shape to the particle... in this case, a dandelion seed. I'd also like to be able to make the seeds "rotate" a little in the "wind" as they move across the screen. However, I'm not sure the exact way to do that. I'm sure it can be easily done with Trapcode, but alas, the budget is not there for such a nice tool. I'm using CS5.5, is there a way to do it with the standard tools?

Thoughts? Thanks!

-jon

Thanks! That gets me pretty close! Just gotta work the physics of it. Is there a way (I may be overlooking it), to vary the size of the particle using Particle playground as there are in other generators? Also, what about working a bit of rotation into the particle? Any thoughts on that?

Thanks again for the direction, that really helped!

-jon