Flash 101 (part 3): Bouncing Around - For The Cool In You (Page 2 of 9 )
Most people - novices included - consider tweening to be the coolest thing about Flash. It's not hard to understand why - Flash's tweening capabilities, combined with some easy-to-learn techniques, allow novices and experts alike to quickly and easily create good-looking animation sequences with minimal effort.
Find that hard to believe? I'll do my best to make you a believer by the end of this article - but first, a little theory.
A tweened animation differs from the frame-by-frame animation you learnt about before in that it doesn't require the animator to animate each and every frame of the animation clip; instead, the animator need only specify the starting and ending frame of the clip, with Flash creating all the intermediate frames.
Consider a simple example: a stone rolling downhill. In traditional frame-by-frame animation, it would be necessary to animate the stone every step of the way on its downhill journey; with tweening, it's only necessary to create two frames - the initial frame, with the stone at the top of the hill, and the final frame, with the stone at the bottom - and Flash will do the rest.
Flash offers two types of tweening: "shape tweening", used primarily to morph one shape into another; and "motion tweening", used to create the illusion of motion (although, as you'll see, you can do a lot more with it too). Shape tweening canot be applied to symbol instances or text blocks, while motion tweening works on symbol instances, grouped elements and text blocks.
This article copyright Melonfire 2000. All rights reserved.Next: The Colour Purple >>
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