- Getting Started
- About Animation
- Understanding the Project File
- Animating Position
- Changing the Pacing and Timing
- Animating Transparency
- Animating Filters
- Animating Transformations
- Changing the Path of the Motion
- Swapping Tween Targets
- Creating Nested Animations
- Easing
- Frame-by-Frame Animation
- Animating 3D Motion
- Testing Your Movie
- Review Questions
- Review Answers
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Testing Your Movie
You can quickly preview your animation by “scrubbing” the red playhead back and forth on the Timeline or by choosing Control > Play. You can also use the integrated Controller at the bottom of the Timeline.
However, to preview your animation as your audience will see it and to preview any nested animations within movie clip symbols, you should test your movie. Choose Control > Test.
Flash exports the published files—in this case, a SWF file—and saves it in the same location as your FLA file. The SWF file is the compressed, final Flash media that you would embed in an HTML page to play in a browser with the Flash Player. Flash displays the SWF file in a new window with the exact Stage dimensions and plays your animation.
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To exit Test Movie mode, click the Close window button.
You can also preview your animation by choosing Control > Test Movie > in Browser, and Flash will export a SWF file and open it automatically in your default browser.
Generating PNG Sequences and Sprite Sheets
While you can create sophisticated animations to play as a SWF file with the Flash Player, you can also use Flash’s powerful tools to create your animation and export it as a series of images for use in other environments. For example, animations with HTML5 or on mobile devices often rely on sequential PNG files or a single file that packs all the images organized in rows and columns, known as a sprite sheet. The sprite sheet is accompanied by a data file that describes the position of each image, or sprite, in the file.
Generating either PNG sequences or a sprite sheet of your animation is easy. First, your animation must be within a movie clip symbol. In the Library panel, right-click/Ctrl-click the symbol and choose Export PNG Sequence.
In the next steps, you select the destination on your hard drive for your images and the dimensions of your images.
For a sprite sheet, right-click/Ctrl-click the symbol and choose Generate Sprite Sheet. The Generate Sprite Sheet dialog box that appears provides different options, such as sizing, background color, and the particular data format.
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Click Export to output the sprite sheet and data file. The data file determines what kind of development environment you’ll use your sprite sheet in. For example, JSON, Starling, cocos2D, and Adobe’s Edge Animate are some of the data formats available.