Add, delete or move “Layers “

It is wise to place all the objects in your “Flash” movie on separate “Layers” give meaningful names, especially when you want to animate these objects.

To add a new “Layer”, click the “New Layer” button below the “Timeline”.

The “Layer” will be added above the “Layer” that was selected, when the “New Layer” button is clicked.

To change the name of a “Layer”, double-click the name of the “Layer”, and type the new name.

The different layers in your “Flash” Movie control the appearance of the different objects in your movie.   In other words, a “Layer” in the “Timeline” is above another “Layer”, then the object in the first “Layer” is above the object from the second “Layer”.

So you can see in the picture below that when “Layer 5” is above the “Layer” “Objects” is also in the figure “layer 5” lies above the low figures of “objects”.

And when I see “Layer 5” below the low, drag “objects”, and the figure in “Layer 5” lies below the low figures of “objects”.

So, as already mentioned, in order to move a “Layer” click and drag it to the desired position. Release the mouse button when a black line appears between the two layers where you want to put this.

To remove a “Layer” select the “Layer” and click the “Delete” button at the bottom of the “Timeline”.

To hide a “Layer”, click the first point to the right of the “Layer” name. If you wish to hide all the “Layers”, click the “eye” icon at the top of the timeline.

The same goes for locking a “Layer”. For example, if you changed anything by mistake in this “Layer”, click the second dot on the right, next to the “Layer” name. If you want to lock all layers, click the “lock” icon at the top of the “Timeline”.  If you want to see the objects in a single “Layer” to be displayed as contours, click the colored square at the far right of the “Layer” name. This can be useful when other objects in other layers are working. To see all objects in all layers displayed as contours, click the “square” icon at the top of the “Timeline”.

If you want to change the color of the contours of a double-“Layer” change the square of that “Layer”. In the “Layer Properties” dialog which opens, you can set the color of the contours for this “Layer”. But we will see more about “Layer Properties” in a later lesson.

 

Distribute Objects on layers

As I have already mentioned, it is wise to place the different objects on different layers, especially when you’d like to animate.

Imagine you spent number of hours drawing and suddenly you realize that all or some of these objects will need animation and the problem is you have drawn everything on one “Layer”.

Then select these objects one by one, copy and paste on a “Layer”, but this may be slightly easier and quicker.

First select the “Layer” in which the objects are located, right-click a selected object and choose “Distribute to layers” in the drop-down menu. Or when you don’t want to place all objects from this “Layer” in its own “Layer”, select only the items you do want to place in its own “Layer”.

“Flash” will automatically select each object in its own places.
Moreover, where each object is made a symbol in “Flash” the “Layer” name will change the symbol name of the object. But more about symbols in the next chapter of this course, when I’m done with the “Layers”.

The “Layer” from where all the “Objects” have been distributed to separate layers, remains empty. So you can delete it.

 

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