Flash Review: Creating a Moving Character
One thing that's made Flash so popular as an animation program is the ability to "cheat" on animations. You can use tweens to set a start and end point, and leave the rest up to the program; you might think this wouldn't work for character animation, but it does. All you need to do is create your character in multiple parts, instead of drawing it all as one piece - with each limb separated out like a marionette's. Then you can play puppet-master all you want with the parts, by controlling each individual piece with its own tweens.
|
|
Flash Review: Adjusting Color with Symbols
Sometimes you'll find that your Flash animation calls for multiple symbols that look exactly alike save for one thing: their color. You may be animating Skittles, or creating a bed of flowers, or millions of other possibilities that would call for the exact same shape filled by different shades. You'd think this would be a pain, forcing you to duplicate and individually edit the symbol until you had as many as you needed in all the right colors - but by tweaking the color options of symbols, you can skip that step and just apply tints to instances of one original symbol.
|
Flash Review: Adding Sound to Buttons
There are days when I wish that Macromedia, back in Flash's original development days, hadn't included an option to 1. add sound, and 2. trigger that sound on various mouse events. If Flash couldn't do that, there wouldn't be overly-glossy smileys screaming "LIKE, OH MY GAWD!" when I'm quietly poking around online; creepy disembodied heads couldn't talk at me randomly and tell me to type in the text box so their heads can melt like Michael Jackson under a heat lamp while they repeat what I typed in a robotic monotone. But if wishes were horses, I'd have a whole My Little Pony farm - and since I don't, Flash must have the ability to add sound to various events...like buttons. Buttons can be used to trigger all kinds of sound events, and with this lesson you, too, can add your own individual note to the cacophony of the web.
|
Sponsored Links
|
![]() |
 |
|
Advertisement
|
Back to newsletter list
