Organizing Frames and Layers for Flash Animation - Outline View
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To help you fit your layers together just the way you want them, Flash lets you display the contents of your layers in outline form. Instead of seeing solid pictures on the stage, you see wireframe images, as in Figure 4-21. Looking at your layer content in outline form is useful in a variety of situations: for example, when you want to align the content of one layer with respect to the content of another.
Tip: To display the content of all your layers as outlines, click the Show All Layers As Outlines icon. (Clicking it again redisplays your layers normally.) Or, to outline the contents of every layer except the one you’re working on, Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (Mac) the outline icon for that layer.
Tip: You can change the color that Flash uses to sketch your outlined content. For example, you can change the color from light to dark so that you can see the outline easier against a light background or so that there’s more contrast between two overlapping outlines. To change the outline color for a layer, first select the layer; then, select Modify -> Timeline -> Layer Properties. From the Layer Properties dialog box that appears, click the Outline Color swatch and then select a color from the Color Picker that appears.
Figure 4-21. Depending on the visual effect you’re going for, you might want to align the centers of your
flowers with the crosspieces of your fence. But when you look at the content normally, it’s hard to see the
alignment, because both your flowers and your fence are opaque. Here, Flash displays the birds, flowers, and fence layers in outline form so that you can concentrate on shape and placement without being distracted by extraneous details.
Next: Organizing Your Layers with Layer Folders >>
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 This article is excerpted from chapter four of the book Flash CS3: The Missing Manual, written by E.A. Vander Veer (O'Reilly, 2007; ISBN: 0596510446). Check it out today at your favorite bookstore. Buy this book now.
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