For the last few months I've been messing around with trying to learn how to use Flash. When I first purchased Flash 8, they offered a "professional version" and a slightly-cut-down version (I don't remember what they called it) and I got the cheaper one. Recently, when Flash 9 came out (aka "Flash CS3") they did away with the double tier, so I was able to upgrade to the full version for a fairly reasonable amount of money.

It's interesting to mess around with vector art. I'm not an artist; I can't draw to save my life. But I've been looking at things others have drawn, trying to understand how they use shading and imphasis lines to fool the eye into seeing 3D where there is none, and it's interesting.

I've also been messing around with the various tools. One thing I'd been having real problems with was adjusting shading borders, multi-segment fills. The only way I'd found to do that was to use the paintbrush tool, and then to adjust individual points by controlling the splines, which is painful. To say the least. The problem is that I don't have a tablet, and trying to control the paintbrush really accurately using a mouse is beyond my eye-hand-coordination threshold.

Just yesterday I noticed that the "pointer" tool displayed something that looked like a curve when I held it in certain places. So I tried clicking and moving it -- and it turned out I was on top of a line between two fill sections, and it permitted me to adjust the curve interactively. It's really nice, and far far more convenient than the approaches I was using.

It's also much nicer for trying to create curves. I used to use the pen tool, placing points and again directly adjusting the splines. But now I know that the right way to create curved areas is just to lay down the general shape with the "straight line" tool, and then to use the "pointer" tool to adjust everything.

I wonder what other surprises this sucker has for me.

...read the manual, you say? Manuals are for wimps.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 03:10 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 357 words, total size 2 kb.