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Flash Reference Guide

Aug 22, 2003

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Animation rarely follows a straight line. Up until this point, however, the animation you’ve created has been very linear—a straight path from point A to point B. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to liven up your animation via an animation path.

An animation path is a line along which an animation can move. The following is an example of an animation path:

Figure 1

Although this line doesn’t look too exciting, it performs an important role by acting as a guide along which a movie clip or graphic can move. You can see this more clearly in the following illustration, which shows the movement of a helicopter along the animation path:

Figure 2

This illustration shows that the helicopter is moving along the foreground layer using a standard motion tween. An animation path for the helicopter can be added to the scene by first creating a new layer, which is called a motion guide. The motion guide is a special layer that you use to draw an animation path, which then controls the animation.

Adding a Motion Guide

It took me awhile to get comfortable with motion guides because of the complexity involved in controlling two drawings in two different layers. The good news is that tools in Flash 8 are making it much easier to create and manage both animation paths and motion guides.

First, you’ll need to create a motion tween. Animation paths will only work with motion tweens. In the following illustration, I’ve created a motion tween of an oval object, which is a movie clip. I find that movie clips are the best object type to use with motion tweens.

Figure 3

The above image shows a motion tween. In this example, the tween is 30 frames long, but the length is arbitrary.

Next, you’ll need to add the motion guide for the animation path. To do this, select the layer in which you have your motion tween-based animation. Right-click the mouse and choose Add Motion Guide from the contextual menu that appears. An example is shown below.

Figure 4

A new layer will be created. You’ll see that the new layer has a new icon in it to denote that it’s a motion guide:

Figure 5

With the new guide layer selected, take the Pencil tool and draw an irregular shape on the screen. This new shape is the animation path, as shown below:

Figure 6

You’re almost done. The next step is to move the playback head in the timeline to frame 1, which is the starting point of your animation. I always find it much easier to start my animations from frame 1 and move forward through the timeline.

Select the object that you want to animate. You’ll see a small white circle on the object. This circle is called the point of origin and it needs to be placed over the beginning of the animation path. This will link the animated object with the animation path for the first keyframe of the motion tween.

Next, move to the final frame of the animation and drag the point of origin over the very end of the line. This joins the animated object's last keyframe, the end of the motion tween, with the end of the animation path. If you do not do this, then the animation will not follow the animation path in the motion guide layer.

Now, test your animation.

You can modify your animations in several ways. The two methods that I want to focus on are Orient to Path and Rotation.

The Orient to Path option is selected by default. This option rotates the animated object against the rotation of the path. This is great if you want this feature and lousy if you don’t. You can turn orientation off by deselecting the check box.

Using Orient to Path eliminates the need to create complex animation sequences for rotating objects along the angle of the animation path. It will take much more time to rotate an object using conventional frame-based animation techniques than using Orient to Path. Orient to Path can be used when you animate objects along a defined path, such as a PacMan moving around a maze.

Rotation will rotate an object while it moves along the timeline. The Rotation control allows you to spin an object clockwise or counter-clockwise as many times as you want during the animation sequence.

After reading through this tutorial, you should now be able to use animation paths with motion tweens to animate objects along an irregular path. If you still have questions, or would like a recap on how to apply motion guides, please review the training video.

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