Flash 101 (part 3): Bouncing Around - For The Cool In You (
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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.
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