Animation and Effects with Macromedia Flash MX 1002004 [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Animating in Flash

Flash is a great tool to choose for animation, particularly because it can handle so much more than just animation and effects. These capabilities allow you to create projects that include amazing graphics and creativity, and advanced functionality and features of an application. Most other animation programs do not enable you to do so.

Chapter 2, you learn about much more about animating in Flash using different kinds of tweens. A tween refers to an automated process in Flash that animates a specified object on the Stage. You make settings of how you want the properties of the object to change, and Flash makes the calculations and movement by filling in the changes that occur.

You can create two different kinds of tweens in Flash: motion tweens and shape tweens. You can use shape tweens to modify a vector line or shape, such as changing a circle into a square. Motion tweens change properties of an object, such as moving them around the Stage or fading something from a visible to invisible state. Flash can also be used to create traditional frame-by-frame animation, where you draw or put images on each frame to create the appearance of motion "manually." A frame-by-frame animation is a traditional way of creating animation. Instead of using Flash to create a tween using automatic calculations, you draw and position each part of the movement by hand in a series of keyframes. This form of animation lets you create complicated effects, particularly when motion and shape tweens don't allow you to create the kind of animation you require. Frame-by-frame animations can be more time-intensive to create and add more file size to your SWF file. However, they are sometimes necessary and can result in unique and amazing animations. You will learn more about these forms of animation in the following chapters.

Chapter 7.

The Timeline appears differently, depending on what kind of animation you use (Figure 1.15). If the animation is a motion tween, the frames are colored purple and include an arrow. If you add a shape tween, the background is light green. If there isn't any animation in the frames, frames appear as a light grey color.