Creating guided motion tweens in Flash
is a very simple process so this tutorial won't be too long. In the
movie above there is a movie clip (that never stops running as you can
see) that has a motion tween, the three orbs are one guided motion tween,
and the title is another guided motion tween. You can combine as many as
you want as long as you plan it out. If you are going to have a place
where you need two different guided tweens at the same time...make a
movie clip for one of them. You could make a movie clip for both if you
wanted also.
The first image above
represents my timeline before I have done anything. The second image shows
that I have added a guide layer above layer one. As you can see layer one
is now indented under the guide layer indicating that it is a guided
layer.
Above represents the first
guided tween for the orbs. Making sure I had the guide layer selected, I
used the pencil tool to draw my motion guides.
I then created my orbs with
the circle tool, converted them to symbols and then placed them on one of
the guide lines. To do this I made sure that layer one and the first key
frame was selected/highlighted and I drew my orb. Then from the Insert
Menu>Convert to Symbol. I then placed the orb on the beginning of the
line I wanted it on. In this case it is the bottom line and at the left
tip of that line. You should always try to line the plus sign on the
symbol to the end of the line. Next I decided how long I wanted to tween
to last in terms of frames and I inserted a key frame at that point.
Making sure that frame is highlighted I moved the orb to the opposite tip
of the line on the right side of the screen. I then right clicked on frame
one of layer one where I put the orb to begin with and chose
Properties>Tweening from the pop up dialog.
I set the tweening to
motion. You don't have to set a rotation but I did just for fun on all the
elements in the movie. When making a guided motion tween *always* make
sure that "Orient to path direction" and "Snap to
guide" are checked.
Each letter in the title
is a separate symbol (with the exception of duplicates like the letter
"e" in which case you can use one symbol for all instances of
it).
Following the above rules, I
then needed to create my movie clip. From the Insert Menu>New Symbol I
named the new symbol burst and set it as a movie clip. Once you do that
another screen opens for you to create your movie clip and it looks just
like the main movie canvas. As you can see, I created my guide layer first
thing and again with the pencil tool, drew my guide line.
On
the first layer I set up my center orb to flash bright and dark. On layers
3 and 4 I placed a cog opposite each other making sure that the plus sign
on the cog symbols was aligned on my guide line. I then
inserted key frames for when I wanted the cycle of the movie clip to end,
went back to key frame one on both layers 3 and 4 and set the motion tweening as I did above for the first tween.
That's all there was too it.
Once I moved back to the main movie, my movie clip is in my library and
all I have to do is drag it where I want it.
I published the movie and as
you can see from the example at the top of the page, everything worked.
There are other types of
tweens you can make with Flash 4 and I will cover that in the next
tutorial.
