Chapter 9: Creating Motion - MACROMEDIA FLASH MX 2004-USING FLASH Use Manual

CHAPTER 9
Creating Motion
Macromedia Flash MX 2004 and Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004 offer several ways to
include animation and special effects in your document. Timeline effects, such as blur, expand,
and explode, make it easy to animate an object: you can simply select the object, then select an
effect and specify parameters. With Timeline effects, you can accomplish in a few easy steps a
previously time-consuming task that required more advanced knowledge of animation.
To create tweened animation, you create starting and ending frames and let Flash create the
animation for the frames in between. Flash varies the object's size, rotation, color, or other
attributes between the starting and ending frames to create the appearance of movement. See
"Tweened animation" on page 161.
You can also create animation by changing the contents of successive frames in the Timeline. You
can make an object move across the Stage, increase or decrease its size, rotate, change color, fade
in or out, or change shape. Changes can occur independently of, or in concert with, other
changes. For example, you can make an object rotate and fade in as it moves across the Stage. In
frame-by-frame animation, you create the image in every frame. See "Frame-by-frame animation"
on page 162.
This chapter contains the following sections:
Using Timeline effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
Tweened animation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
Frame-by-frame animation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Layers in animation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Creating keyframes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Representations of animations in the Timeline. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Frame rates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Extending still images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
Distributing objects to layers for tweened animation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
Tweening instances, groups, and type. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Tweening motion along a path . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
157