Flash 101 - Part 2: Lights, Camera, Flash!

Each of the objects you see is an "instance" of the symbol - these instances can be modified without affecting the parent symbol. To modify an instance, select it and use the Modify->Instance menu item to display the Instance tool panel. From this panel, you can modify certain characteristics of that particular instance of the symbol - in particular, the Effects panel allows you to alter the colour, transparency and brightness of the selected instance. You can also use the Modify->Transformmenu items to scale, rotate, skew and flip the instance of the object.

After you've finished futzing around with the various triangles, you might end up with something like this:

Again, if you take a look at the Library, you'll see that the original symbol is untouched - it's only the instances which have changed.

If, however, you'd like your changes to apply to each and every instance of a symbol, you will need to make changes to the symbol itself. You can do this by right-clicking the symbol in the Library and picking the Edit option, or by clicking the Edit Symbols button on the top-right corner of your screen.

Flash will drop you into symbol-editing mode, where you can edit the shape, size and other attributes of the symbol. Once you're done, you can return to the work area by clicking the Edit Scene button at the top right corner of your screen.

If you made any changes to the symbol while in symbol-editing mode, those changes will be immediately reflected in the symbol instances on the Stage. As an example, try scaling your triangle to twice its size and return to the Stage - you'll see that the symbol instances have also doubled in size.

Note that some attributes of the instance may not change - the changes that you have made to a specific instance will be retained wherever possible. In the example above, though the size of each instance changes when the size of the symbol changes, the per-instance colour and shape settings remains the same.

And that's about it for this week. In the next article, I'll be showing you how to use Flash's tweening capabilities in conjunction with symbols and instances to create simple motion and shape morphs.

See you then!

Note: All examples in this article have been tested on Macromedia Flash 5.0. Examples are illustrative only, and are not meant for a production environment. YMMV!
Copyright Melonfire, 2000. All rights reserved.