Rather than trying to process Poser renders, I thought it would be interesting to try to vectorize some frame grabs. more...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Flash at 10:46 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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I think I moaned here one time about the fact that I couldn't figure out how to make shape tweens work in Flash. I finally figured out what the problem was.

If you're doing a motion tween, the object you're moving can be a movie clip or a specific shape object that you've dragged-and-dropped. But when you're doing a shape tween, you have to be in a movie clip, and the graphics have to be created in-line. You can't use graphics objects.

What I had tried to do was to create a graphic object for my initial shape, and make a copy of it and modify it for my end object. Then I tried to create a movie clip, put the initial object into the timeline, create a shape tween, and paste my end graphic object in for the final state. The result was somewhere between unsatisfactory and completely bogus.

However, I still don't have the fine points down. I can get what I want now for areas, but if I try to put lines around part of those areas, those act in unusual ways.

You get lines on the interpolated frames, even if they're "do not display" on the key frames.

And another weirdness: shape tweens must have the graphics inline, but motion tweens cannot have. If you draw your shape and accidentally say "motion tween" instead of "shape tween", Flash automatically creates a graphics object for you, and then shape tweening won't work. So you can't turn the motion tween off and switch to shape tweening; it won't let you. You have to undo the motion tween to undo the automatically created graphic item.

In fact, there are all kinds of things you can do accidentally which will cause Flash to automatically turn your inline drawing into a separate graphic shape, thus rendering your shape tween useless. It's really a royal pain.

UPDATE: I had a cockpit error and there used to be a bunch of moaning and groaning inline here about it. User Mark figured out my problem, and I've deleted the moaning and groaning, and all the comments which were involved.

Thanks, Mark!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Flash at 03:39 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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