Advanced Flash Animation - Working with Defined Paths

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Sometimes you want your animation to follow a specific path, something more complex than mere bouncing balls or side-to-side, up-and-down motion. Maybe you have a bee that you want to maliciously swarm around someone's photo. Not a problem. We could even get it to sting if we wanted to. (And you better believe we want to).

To get our rectangle to move along a defined path, we start off by creating a simple tween. Use your rectangle symbol and insert it into frame one. Make frame eighty your keyframe, just so we have some room to play around with. Next, create a motion tween in one of the frames between. Now that we have done that, the next step is to create our Defined Path.

Right click on your layer (the layer is where it says Layer 1) and choose Add Motion Guide. Now highlight the first frame of this motion guide layer and select your Pencil tool from the Toolbar Pane. Next, draw a path you wish for your object to follow; go ahead and go nuts. Make it real crazy.

Next, click on your Layer 1, and click inside the first frame. Drag your rectangle to the beginning of the path. Next, click the final frame, and drag your rectangle to the end of your path.

Note: If your pencil line is set to a color, it will be visible. To change this, select your pencil line and change the Alpha in the Property Inspector to 0 (making it transparent).

Now click back in the first frame of your Layer 1, and press Enter. Your button should follow whatever wacky path you set for it.

My User-Defined Path Before I Changed the Pencil Line to Transparent

Next: Masking >>
 

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