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Frame By Frame, Motion and Shape Tweening
Author: Robert Clements | Website: http://www.thepuma.co.uk |

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The Tweens

Frame By Frame, Motion and Shape Tweening

There are 3 main ways to animate anything in Flash 5.  These are Frame by Frame, Motion Tweening and Shape Tweening.  This tutorial covers each of the three and aims to teach new flash designers the basics of animation. 

 

Frame By Frame

As the name suggests, this is animation produced by changing small parts of an image, in every frame.  This can be done easily using the time line. 

Draw an image in the first frame of your movie.  

Then right click the second frame on the timeline and select insert key frame.

An identical image appears in frame two, which can be changed without editing the image in frame one.

and obviously this is done several hundred times until the animation is complete.  Is this a good way or a bad way?  For myself, this is a bad way.  I couldn't sit and make tiny changes in every frame.  That's me being impatient.  For skilled artists this is by far the most accurate way to animate. 

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Motion Tween

Motion tweening is a much quicker way to animate.  The concept of tweening is that you decide the first and last frames and Flash fills in the middle.  Only one object can move in a motion tween on one layer. We tend to have a layer for each object to allow several objects to move at the same time. 

First draw your frame number 1. 

Now right click this frame on the time line and select add motion tween. 

Choose where your tween will end on the time line and insert a key frame here.  (Right click)

To make the animation actually achieve something, you must now edit the last frame. 

Notice that motion tweens are BLUE. 

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Shape Tween

This is similar to Motion Tweening.  The differences are that it is more like morphing.  One object can change into another.  Also because of this, both the objects have to be in body.  Simply select any object and press CTRL + B, to change it to body. 

First create two frames side by side.  Frame one holds your first object, and frame two holds your last object.

Make sure everything is in body, (CTRL + B) to be sure. 

Now select both frames on the time line.  Click one, hold down shift and click the second.

Find the frame tab. If not visible go to the windows menu and find it in the panels submenu.

From the drop down list, labelled tweening, select shape. 

Now drag the last frame along the timeline to make the animation's time length. 

Also note shape tweens are GREEN on the time line.

 

Each of these three techniques will produce an animation.  Each one is for different functions but only your own experimenting will teach you where your work could use each type. 

 

www.thepuma.co.uk

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» Level Basic

Added: : 2002-01-02 Rating: 6.53 Votes: 114 Hits: 7190

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Young but experienced, freelance flash designer.

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