- Getting started
- About animation
- Understanding the project file
- Animating position
- Changing the pacing and timing
- Animating transparency
- Animating filters
- Animating transformations
- Editing multiple frames
- Changing the path of the motion
- Swapping tween targets
- Creating nested animations
- Easing
- Frame-by-frame animation
- Animating 3D motion
- Exporting your final movie
- Review questions
- Review answers
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
About animation
Animation is the change of an object’s appearance over time. Animation can be as simple as moving a ball across the Stage, which is a change in the object’s position. It can also be much more complex. As you’ll see in this lesson, you can animate many different properties of an object. In addition to an object’s position, you can change its color or transparency, change its size or rotation, or even animate the filters that you saw in the previous lesson. You also have control over an object’s path of motion and even its easing, which is the way an object accelerates or decelerates its property changes.
In Animate, the basic workflow for animation goes like this: Select an object on the Stage and choose Create Motion Tween. Move the playhead to a different point in time and move the object to a new position or change one of its properties. Animate takes care of the rest by smoothly interpolating the changes between the two points in time.
Motion tweens create animation for changes in position on the Stage and for changes in size, color, or other attributes. Motion tweens require you to use a symbol instance. If the object you’ve selected is not a symbol instance, Animate will automatically ask to convert the selection to a symbol.
Animate also automatically separates motion tweens onto their own layers, which are called tween layers. There can be only one motion tween per layer, and there can be no other element on the layer. Tween layers allow you to change various attributes of your instance at different key points over time. For example, a spaceship could be very small on the left side of the Stage at the beginning keyframe and much larger at the far-right side of the Stage at an ending keyframe, and the resulting tween would make the spaceship both fly across the Stage and slowly grow in size.