Taking A Hint...Or Two...Or Three - Flash

Last time, you learned the basics of animation by creating aframe-by-frame motion clip. This time, find out how Flash's powerfultweening tools can help you create good-looking animation clips withminimal time and effort. Also covered: shape hints and motion guides.

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By: icarus, (c) Melonfire

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December 27, 2000

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Flash also allows you to control the manner in which the shape morphs happen with a feature known as "shape hints" - essentially, tiny markers that allow you to create a one-to-one correspondence between specific points in the initial and final shapes.

Let's suppose you had two shapes, which looked like this.

By default, when Flash tweens them together, the sequence looks like this.

But when I add shape hints to the starting and ending shapes

the shape tween tries to ensure that the marked points correspond to each other during the tween.

You can add a shape hint through the Modify -> Transform -> Add Shape Hint menu command, or with the Ctrl-Shift-H keyboard shortcut.

And that's about it for this week. Next time, I'll be talking about using the Text tool, and I'll also show you how to create clickable buttons for your animation clip. Have a great Christmas and New Year - and remember, don't drink and drive.

This article copyright Melonfire 2000. All rights reserved.