Take a look at these tutorials that cover the basics of shape and motion tweening, as well as exploring the more detailed options.
In this lesson we'll cover how to create a new blank movie file in Flash MX, and the tools and steps involved in making your first simple animation using motion tweening and basic shapes.
Shape Hints make it easier for Flash to interpret how it's supposed to morph one complex shape into another in a shape tween.
Create a fading gradient effect using shape tweens.
Use shape tweens to create a fading opacity effect.
The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but that doesn't mean you have to tween that way. Learn how to assign your Flash Motion Tweens to paths called Motion Guides, so that you can animate along complex paths with only two keyframes.
Another way to control your Flash motion tweens is through an option called Easing.
In the first Flash lesson, we covered motion tweening as a basic "Point A to Point B" process but you can also use motion tweens to rotate your symbols.
It's time to get our characters moving, using the movie clip symbols that we set up in previous lessons to control our limbs as a whole, and in sub-parts--and also to animate our facial features and give them expression and lip movements.
This will be a fairly simple lesson. Before we get into animating the limbs, we're going to add speech bubbles--we'll learn about adding actual audio tracks later--to learn about working with text in Flash, and to give our characters a "voice" to communicate with the viewer.
In this lesson, we're going to learn how to "cheat' on making detailed animated characters in Flash without actually drawing every frame.
Now that we’ve set the stage for our E-card, let’s go ahead and animate it. For the first part of that, we’re going to use a new kind of symbol called a Movie Clip.
This tutorial offers you a chance to get more familiar with using Flash's drawing tools to set a scene for an animation, and a few little gradient and fill tricks. This part of the lesson will walk you through creating the scene for a Fourth of July exploding fireworks E-card; a future lesson will demonstrate how to animate it.
With this lesson, we'll pick up at the end of where we left off in Lesson 1, with a lesson on shape tweening in Flash MX.
Colorful shape tweens aren't limited just to solid colors; you can also tween gradients to change colors, and fade in and out of each other.
