Flash animation overview

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Overview

Motion tweening means motion animation with interpolation.

Learning goals

Learn about the various methods to create motion animations in Flash

Prerequisites

Flash CS3 desktop tutorial or Flash CS4 desktop tutorial

Flash layers tutorial (first part)

Flash drawing tutorial (at least some of it)

Flash frame-by-frame animation tutorial (not absolutely needed, but probably useful)

Immediate next steps

Flash classic motion tweening tutorial (CS3-style tweening for CS3 and better)

Flash CS4 motion tweening tutorial (CS4, CS5)

AS3 TweenLite tweening engine (CS3-CS5, intermediate)

Moving on

Flash shape tweening tutorial

Flash animation summary

After that you should be ready for interactivity. E.g. do the Flash button tutorial

Quality and level

This is just an overview article.

Introduction

In Flash CS3 to CS5, you can create several kinds of animations and associated special effects. To create motion animations, there are several options:

(1) Frame-by-frame animation Frame by frame animation is an ancient technique used for cartoons. This leads to precise results but is time consuming. See the Flash frame-by-frame animation tutorial.

(2) Motion tweening with the CS Flash authoring interfaces Wikipedia, retrieved 20:45, 7 August 2007 (MEST) defines “Tweening, short for in-betweening, as the process of generating intermediate frames between two images to give the appearance that the first image evolves smoothly into the second image. Inbetweens are the drawings between the keyframes which help to create the illusion of motion. Tweening is a key process in all types of animation, including computer animation. Sophisticated animation software enables one to identify specific objects in an image and define how they should move and change during the tweening process. Software may be used to manually render or adjust transitional frames by hand or use to automatically render transitional frames using interpolation of graphic parameters.”. In other contexts, one uses also "morphing". E.g. PCMag (retrieved 20:45, 7 August 2007 (MEST)) defines tweening as “An animation technique that, based on starting and ending shapes, creates the necessary "in-between" frames. See morphing”.

In CS4/CS5, there exist two variants:

1. Classic motion tweening as known from CS3 and earlier versions. See the Flash classic motion tweening tutorial.
2. Motion tweening, a more oject-oriented method introduced in Flash CS4. See Flash CS4 motion tweening tutorial

(3) Motion tweening with ActionScript code

There exist many different possibilities, e.g.

• Dynamically changing x and y positions of a display object over time, e.g. through using the Timer class. See the unfinished Flash games tutorial for an example.

• Using the Adobe "fl.motion" classes. See the Flash CS4 motion tweening with AS3 tutorial

• Using a third party library like AS3 TweenLite tweening engine. Must need to know for everyone who plans to create interactive educational scenarios.

(4) Special purpose motion animations

E.g.:

• Inverse kinematics, i.e. animation of armatures for shapes or connected symbols instances.Flash CS4 inverse kinematics tutorial
• Shape tweening, since you can position key frames of shapes in different positions.

What can be animated with built-in motion tweening ?

In Flash 9/10, you can animate all sorts of compound objects:

• Symbols, i.e. any object that is an instance of a library object, e.g.
  • Graphic symbols
  • Movie clips
  • Buttons
• Compound objects (things that you grouped together)
• Text boxes

The ground rules are the following:

• Motion animation means just changing x/y positions of an object over time. Of course during the motion path one also can change other properties, e.g. orientation, size and tint.
• With all built-in tools, an animation is usually done in a single layer with a single instance of something that sits in the library.
• With ActionScript it depends, but usually you also would use "heavy" objects like movie clips.