Flash animation overview

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Overview

Learning goals

Learn about the various methods to create 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)

Next steps

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

Flash CS4 motion tweening tutorial (CS4, CS5)

Flash shape tweening tutorial

AS3 TweenLite tweening engine (CS3-CS5, intermediate)

Moving on

Flash CS4 inverse kinematics tutorial

Flash animation summary

Flash CS4 motion tweening with AS3 tutorial

After these (or even before) 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 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, since you will have to draw each picture. 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) Shape animations

• Shape tweening, since you can position key frames of shapes in different positions.

(4) Motion and shape 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

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.

Flash CS4 timeline representations of interpolations

Adobe show different types of animations using the timeline in the following way: According to Animation basics, (retrieved 11:17, 25 April 2010 (UTC))

• A span of frames with a blue background indicates a motion tween. A black dot in the first frame of the span indicates that the tween span has a target object assigned to it. Black diamonds indicate the last frame and any other property keyframes. Property keyframes are frames that contain property changes explicitly defined by you. You can choose which types of property keyframes to display by right-clicking (Windows) or Command-clicking (Macintosh) the motion tween span and choosing View Keyframes > type from the context menu. Flash displays all types of property keyframes by default. All other frames in the span contain interpolated values for the tweened properties of the target object.

• A hollow dot in the first frame indicates that the target object of the motion tween has been removed. The tween span still contains its property keyframes and can have a new target object applied to it.

• A span of frames with a green background indicates an inverse kinematics (IK) pose layer. Pose layers contain IK armatures and poses. Each pose appears in the Timeline as a black diamond. Flash interpolates the positions of the armature in the frames in between poses.

• A black dot at the beginning keyframe with a black arrow and blue background indicates a classic tween.

• A dashed line indicates that the classic tween is broken or incomplete, such as when the final keyframe is missing.

• A black dot at the beginning keyframe with a black arrow and a light green background indicates a shape tween.

• A black dot indicates a single keyframe. Light gray frames after a single keyframe contain the same content with no changes. These frames have a vertical black line and a hollow rectangle at the last frame of the span.

• A small a indicates that the frame includes an associated script (created with the Actions panel).

• A red flag indicates that the frame contains a label. This allows for instance to write AS code like:

 ''GotoAndPlay("label");''

• A green double slash indicates that the frame contains a comment.

• A gold anchor indicates that the frame is a named anchor.