“Eases”

There are some properties of the “Motion Editor” that you need to try out for yourself . So I’m not going to explain all of them but, I still want to give an explanation about the “Eases” feature.

In this example I have an object and a “ball” to which I’ve added a “Motion tween” from bottom to top.

The motion path that appears on the “Stage” when the “Motion Tween” is selected, consists of a colored line with dots. Each of these dots represents a frame in the “Timeline”.

If there is no “Gear” applied on the “Tween”, the distance between the dots is the same (1). This means that the distance between two frames will be taken as the same.

However, when a “Gear” is applied to the tween, you see that the distance between these dots is no longer equal (2). The greater the distance between two dots, the faster the object is moving.

This is how we define the “Eases” feature.

In order to apply a “Gear”, scroll to the “Eases” section at the bottom of the “Motion Editor”, the standard “Gear” is “Simple (slow)”.

You can change this value by entering the number (1) next to this standard “Gear” .

If you enter a high number, the object will start quickly and reduce the speed gradually.

If you type a low number, eg -100, the movement of the object starts slowly but starts building up speed.

Now that we have entered the value for this gear, l we must still apply a characteristic, in this case the y-position of the object.

The y-position is the vertical position of the object, and when something falls it is usually down, or so we learned at school.
The fall of an object that falls down, begins slowly and increases the speed as it falls.
Thus, we apply the property of the y-position.

Just click the downward pointing arrow next to this property, and select “Easy (slow)” in the list.
Test the movie (Ctrl + Enter).

In “Flash”, we have a number of preset types of “Gears”.

To apply this to an object, we must add it to the “Gear” list.

Just click the plus sign on the right side of the “Eases”, and choose a type.

There is also an additional option of “Bounce”, which takes in a number.

Once you have added, it will also appear in the list of “Gears”, and you can apply it to an object.

 

From “Motion Tween” into “Action Script”

The reason for making “Action Script” code for a motion is that, it lets you add animation to several objects while the “Flash” movie is playing.

Normally the topic for this course should be “Action Script” but because it is made so easy in “Flash CS4”, I will show you how to do this.

What I have is a layer containing a “Motion Tween” to an object. In this case, our ball.

The first thing we do is add a layer where we would place the “Action Script” code (1).

Then right-click the “Motion Tween” and choose “Copy Motion as Action script 3.0” from the pop-up menu.

This will copy the “Action Script” code used for this “Motion tween”.

Remove the “Motion Tween” in the “Circle” layer which we do not need.

Click above the tween, and select “Remove Tween” in the drop-down menu.

Then we remove the redundant frames, frames 2 t / m 15 (2) which are no longer necessary.

Then select the object, in this case the ball in frame 1 of the “Circle” layer, open the “Properties window” and give it the name of the “ball”. No matter what name you use for this purpose, as long as the object has a name and you remember it.

Then select the first frame of the new “AS” layer and press the F9 key on your keyboard.
This opens the “Actions”.

With the cursor on the first line in the “Actions”, press ‘Ctrl + V’ on your keyboard.

This will make all the “Action Script” code in the “Actions” window.

Scroll to the bottom of the “Actions” window and remove the slashes for line 38.

The slashes indicate that the line is commented, but this has nothing to do with you so, just remove it.

Change the textin the name you have entered for the object on the “Stage”. In this case, this “ball”.

Test your movie.

You are now an “Action Script” expert.

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