Flash Basic Tweening

Flash 2D Animation Basicsby mufti akbar kurniawan

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Flash Basics: Tweening

Creating Your First Flash Animation

Flash Basics: TweeningOpening a New Movie File in Flash

In this lesson we'll cover how to create a new blank movie file, and the tools and steps involved in making your first simple animation using motion tweening.

To start with, you'll open Flash by clicking on the program icon in the directory that you've installed it in. If this is your first time loading the program, it'll ask you to choose either Designer or Developer view, and a resolution that matches your monitor settings (this isn't applicable to versions of Flash prior to MX). For our purposes in this tutorial I've chosen Designer view, and my screen is set to a resolution of 1024x768. (You can always change this later by clicking the "Window" option in the top toolbar and then selecting "Panel Sets".) Once you've finished that, you'll see a blank canvas surrounded by tool sets, like the window above.

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Adjusting Document Settings

The canvas is set to a default size; because I prefer to work at standard sizes and aspect ratios for web production, I'm going to change my canvas size from the default of 550 pixels wide x 400 pixels high to a smaller size of 320 x 240. I'm going to do this by clicking the button on the Properties tab--the panel just below the canvas and working area--that displays the canvas size; this will open a new pop-up window containing the document's properties. For right now you only need to worry about three things: the document size, the background color, and the frame rate.

I'm going to adjust my size to 320 x 240 by manually entering the values in the spaces provided, use the color picket to select a light blue background, and leave the frame rate set at 12 fps (frames per second). This is the default frame rate for web production; for television and other media production, it can go as high as 30 frames per second. 12 is all that you really need for Flash animation for the web; it still allows a consistent flow of motion, but avoids raising your file sizes by adding extra frames.

Flash Basics: TweeningIntroduction to the Primary Toolbar and Drawing a Shape

Positioned to the left side of the window, you'll see the Tools panel, with icons giving you access to the primary functions you'll need to start drawing and animating in Flash. To start with, you can click the icon that looks like a hand, in the left-hand column about halfway down under the "View" heading. This is the (aptly and amusingly named) Hand Tool; if you click and drag your mouse in your work area with this tool selected, you can literally drag your canvas about until it's positioned where you please.

Once you've got your work space settled comfortably, let's try drawing something. Under the top section of the Tools panel, click on the button depicting a white circle outlined in black; this is the Oval Tool. You can use this to draw any circular shape. Below the rest of the tools are two color-picker windows: one for the "Stroke" (represented by a graphic of a pencil) and the other for the "Fill" (represented by a graphic of a paint bucket). The stroke is the color of the shape's outline, while the fill is the color inside the shape. I'm going to set my stroke to black and my fill to a dark blue, and then draw a small circle in the upper left corner of my canvas by clicking and then dragging until the shape is at the desired size before releasing.

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Viewing the Timeline

Now before we jump right into animating, let's take a look at another area of the window: the timeline, set above the work area (depicted in the image below). The timeline is divided into two columns: the Layers column, and the actual timeline itself, divided into individual frames; the sliding red line marks your current position in the timeline. The timeline is one of the most important tools in Flash MX; it allows you to keep track of your various objects and shapes and which layer they're on, as well as keeping track of your animation key frames and their timing and placement. Most of the work of your animations will be done here.

As you can see, right now we have one layer (containing the circle drawn in the previous step) with one timeline associated with that layer. The first frame of the timeline is grayed out, with a small black dot marking it; what that means is that this frame is a key frame, created automatically when you drew the circle on that frame. In order to animate using tweening, you must define key frames; without them Flash has no beginning or ending points to animate in between.

Flash Basics: TweeningConverting Your Shape to a Symbol

Before we go any further, we'll need to make some changes to our circle. Why do we need to convert the shape we've already drawn to something else? Because Flash doesn't tween ordinary shapes; if you try to apply a tween while the objects are still shapes, it won't work, so we convert them to symbols; it won't take more than a moment.

Just right-click on your circle, and select "Convert to Symbol". A popup window will appear, asking what you want to name the symbol and what Behavior to apply to it; type in a name, and select "Graphic"; the other options will be covered later, in more advanced lessons. Click "OK"; you'll see the change in your object by the blue outline surrounding it. This symbol will now appear in the Library, which you can view by pressing F11 or clicking on Window -> Library; when symbols or objects are listed in the Library, they can be re-used at any point by simply dragging them onto the canvas.

Now, let's get back to animating. On the next page, we'll create another key frame so that we can tell Flash to animate in between them.

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Creating a New Key Frame

Let's look a the timeline again. If you'll remember, we set the frame rate for this document to 12 frames per second; that means that twelve of the blocks in the timeline will make up one second of animation. I want my circle to move over one second, so I'm going to click on the twelfth block; the timeline is marked in increments of five, so just count two after the "10" marker. If you right-click on the 12th frame, you'll see two keyframe options: "Insert Keyframe" and "Insert Blank Keyframe". You'll want to click on "Insert Keyframe"; this automatically copies everything on the previous keyframe (including our circle) to the new keyframe.

After clicking "Insert Keyframe", you can see that now the 12th frame is grayed out and marked with a dot, just like the first; the space in between them is also grayed, with the 11th frame marked by a small white square. This indicates that there is no motion or "tween" placed on the frames in between; Flash has automatically placed a hold on these frames so that they continuously fill with a repeat of the key frame.

So now, technically, we have a one-second animation--only the animation doesn't actually visibly move. In the next step we'll move things around a little, and start to really get our animation off the ground.

Flash Basics: TweeningMoving Your Symbol on a New Frame

Now we're going to go back to our workspace; making sure that you're still on frame 12 (the red timeline marker should be over that frame), use the Arrow tool to select the circle that you drew before; you'll be able to tell that it's selected by the blue outline surrounding it again.

Click and drag on the circle to move it anywhere on your canvas; I'm going to move mine to the lower right-hand corner of my active space. (Unless you want to animate your shape moving off-screen, don't move it into the gray area surrounding the canvas; objects in the gray area do not show up on the final animation.)

If you return to your timeline and click on frame 1, pressing the "Enter" key will play all of your animation; however, it doesn't look quite right, does it? The circle remains in the original position for the first eleven frames, before suddenly snapping to the new location. In the next step, we'll take care of that by applying the motion tween.

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Adding a Motion Tween to Your Animation

Believe it or not, this is the easy part. In Flash, "motion tweening" is used to describe the process where the program automatically creates the frames between keyframe A of an object's timeline and keyframe B to make a smooth animation depicting the object moving from one location to another. This is different from "shape tweening" because it doesn't affect the object's shape, size, or color, but we'll cover that in the next lesson.

To apply your motion tween, simply click and drag your mouse from frame 1 to frame 12 to select them; then you can either right-click on the frames and select "Create Motion Tween", or you can click on the "Tween" dropdown in the Properties tool panel and select "Motion". (Leave the other options at their default settings.) The affected frames will turn a shade of pale violet, and an arrow will appear stretching from the first keyframe to the last; this is the sign of a successful motion tween. (If the frames turn violet but the arrow is replaced by a dashed line, right-click and select "Remove Tween" before verifying that you've completed the steps properly.)

Flash Basics: TweeningConclusion

You have now successfully completed your first animation; to play it, just press the Enter key on the timeline, or preview by selecting File -> Preview in Browser to see what it will look like when exported. You should see your circle moving smoothly from point A to point B, with no jumps in between.

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Flash Basics: TweeningFlash Tip: Shape Hints

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Flash Tip: Shape Tweening Expanded: Controlling Alpha


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Flash Tip: Shape Tweening Expanded: Controlling Hue


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Flash Tip: Motion Tweening Expanded: Easing


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Flash Tip: Shape Tweening Expanded: Rotation


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Flash Tip: Shape Tweening Expanded: Motion Guides

The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but that doesn’t meant that that’s the only line that you’re forced to travel when you’re creating a Motion Tween in Flash.

You can assign Motion Tweens to paths so that you can have an object travel from point A to point B—or in our case, keyframe A to keyframe B—by any route that you choose, without having to insert additional keyframes at major turning points.

In order to do this, we’ll need create an object on our stage so that we can learn how to use Motion Guides. The Add Motion Guide button is the second icon from the left on the bottom of the Timeline panel.


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Adding a Motion GuideWhen you click the Add Motion Guide button while a layer is selected, a new layer will appear above it with the name Guide: (Laye r Name) . The l i ne separating the two layers will be dashed, to indicate that they’re linked to each other/affecting each other.

Creating a Motion PathOn your Motion Guide layer, you’re going to draw a line. You can do this with the Pen Tool, the Line Tool, or the Brush Tool, though I’d recommend the Pen Tool for the smoothest line. This line is the path that your shape will follow.

Copy the keyframe created when you drew your path, and paste it further down the timeline; where you paste it will depend on how long you want your shape to take to go from the beginning to the end of the motion path.


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Creating a SymbolNow make a symbol {F8} out of whatever shape you chose to tween; the default, remember, is a Graphic type. If you’ll recall from our first lesson on tweening, motion tweens require symbols in order to work.

Aligning With the Start of the Path

Click on your symbol, and drag it to the starting point of the path. By default, when you bring it close enough, the symbol’s center (the white dot) should snap onto the end of the path.

Aligning With the End of the Path

Copy the keyframe to the last frame in your sequence, and this time move the symbol so that it snaps to the ending point of the path.


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Inserting a Motion Tween

Now you insert a motion tween just like you would normally, by clicking any frame between your first and last keyframes and either right-clicking to select Create Motion Tween, or else using the Properties panel to select the tween type

Conclusion

When you’re done, you’ll have an animation that follows the path that you set out, using only two keyframes to create a rather complex motion sequence.


see you next time....

Documents

Flash Basic Tweening