esoteric Flash geek talk

[scarfman]

Remember when I complained about shape tweens that don't track? Well, today I was working on a segment of my secret Flash project. I drew several figures in shapes made up of strokes and fills. I created a string of frames in the timeline for all the objects and inserted a keyframe in the first panel and in the middle of the timeline. In the first panel I moved all the figures offscreen to the left, since the scene is to start with the characters coming into shot. I created shape tweens between the two keyframes, and ran the scene.

Two of the objects' fills did the rotating corners thing like the scarftail in the problem demo linked in the previous entry.

Not the stokes. Just the fills.

All I'd done was select all objects in the frame and move them to the left. Two - and only two - did this to me.

I decided on the spot I'll work in motion tweens only from now on. The bad news is this means working exclusively in symbols*. The good news is, the decision seems to have removed a major contribution to whatever psychological obstacles there are to my getting down to work on my Flash project: I got so involved this evening that I updated AKOTAS ninety minutes late.

* For the non-Flash literate (if any have made it this far), that essentially means working in virtual cut-out animation.

Comments

[theta-g.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall some nonsense like you have to address the corners of a shape at the beginning of a shape tween in the order they are drawn (clockwise or whatever) and map them to similarly sequential points in the shape at the end of the shape tween. otherwise flash will assume you did and you end up with a twisted hammock mess.

[scarfman]

I think you're talking about the feature called "shape hints". I've tried to use it before on misbehaving shapes, but it hasn't worked for me. But none of the directions for use I've read have said anything about the sequence the points were originally created. When or if I decide to try shape tweening again, I'll remember that. Or at least I'll remember the phrase twisted hammock mess - that describes the image perfectly. Thanks.