Changing The Appearance Of Sprites - MACROMEDIA DIRECTOR MX-USING DIRECTOR MX Use Manual

Changing the appearance of sprites

You can change the appearance of sprites on the Stage without affecting the cast member assigned
to the sprite. You can resize, rotate, skew, flip, and apply new foreground and background colors
to sprites. Applying these changes allows you to reuse the same cast member to create several
different versions of an image. For example, you can create a flipped and rotated sprite with a new
color. Since each cast member adds to downloading time, reusing cast members in this way
reduces the number of cast members in your movie and makes it download faster.
Resizing and scaling sprites
You can resize sprites directly on the Stage by dragging their handles. To resize the sprite precisely,
you can enter coordinates or scale sprites by a specified percentage on the Sprite tab in the
Property inspector. You can also set the sprite's size with Lingo.
Changing a sprite's size on the Stage doesn't change the size of the cast member that is assigned to
the sprite, nor is the size of the sprite affected if you resize its cast member.
In some cases, resizing bitmap sprites can cause noticeable delays. If a bitmap sprite must be a
particular size, make the cast members that appear in the sprite the proper size. You can do this
with Modify > Transform Bitmap or in any image-editing program. Scaling and resizing sprites
works best with vector shapes.
Note: The procedure for resizing a rotated or skewed sprite is different from the following procedures. See
"Rotating and skewing sprites" on page 176.
To resize a sprite by dragging its handles:
Select the sprite.
1
On the Stage, drag any of the sprite's resize handles. Hold down Shift while dragging to
2
maintain the sprite's proportions.
To scale a sprite by pixels or by an exact percentage:
Select the sprite you want to scale and click the Sprite tab of the Property inspector
1
(Graphical view).
Click the Scale button.
2
The Scale Sprite dialog box appears.
Enter new values to scale the sprite by doing one of the following:
3
•
Specify a pixel size in the Width or Height text boxes. If Maintain Proportions is selected, all
the updatable fields adjust to reflect the new scaled size. If Maintain Proportions is not
selected, you can specify new proportions in the Width and Height text boxes.
•
Enter a percentage in the Scale text box.
Click OK.
4
The sprite is scaled relative to its current size not to the size of its parent cast member.
Sprites 175