Flash 101 - Part 3: Bouncing Around

A Tint Of Scarlet

How about something a little more complex? Go back to frame #10, right-click the ellipse, and choose the Scale option. Modify the ellipse by pulling the scaling handles until you have something that looks like this:

Play the clip again - your ellipse should change shape while it's moving across the Stage.

Let's add a little colour shift as well, shall we? With the instance in frame #10 still selected, pop open the Window -> Panels -> Effect dialog, and choose "Tint" from the drop-down menu. Pick a tint colour - the fill colour of the flattened ellipse in frame #10 should immediately change to the selected colour.

When you play the clip, your ellipse will not only change shape, but colour too.

Taking The Scenic Route

By default, Flash chooses the shortest distance between the starting and ending positions of the object as the motion path. If this is not to your requirements, you also have the option of tweening motion along a path that you define.

Let's consider a new example to illustrate this better. Open up a new Flash movie, and at frame #1, create a small dot with the Brush tool. Convert it to a graphic symbol.

Next, move to frame #25, insert a new keyframe and move the dot to the other end of the stage.

Create a motion tween and play the clip - your dot will travel horizontally across the Stage, since that's the shortest distance between the two positions.

To add your own motion path, right-click the layer containing the dot, and use the "Add Motion Guide" command to add a new motion guide layer - this layer will hold the path for motion path for your tween.

Draw the path that you'd like the symbol to traverse with the Pen, Pencil, Brush or Pen tool.

Note that you need to "snap" the symbol to the beginning and end of the motion path after you're done - you can do this by selecting the symbol with the Arrow tool and dragging it to the appropriate end-point of the path until the symbol's "registration point" (the little hollow dot in the center) snaps to the end-point of the path. When you play the clip again, the dot should travel along the path you've just created.

You can choose to have either the baseline of the symbol, and/or its registration point, oriented towards the motion path, by selecting the "Orient To Path" and "Snap" options respectively in the Frame panel.

Copyright Melonfire, 2000. All rights reserved.