Animating Depth: Tweening Movement - Flash 3D: Animation, Interactivity, and Games - page 59

Tweening is another popular animation method in Flash. What is a tween? Since a key-
frame artist creates only the significant changes within an animation, another artist fills
in the transitional frames between each keyframe, hence tweening . Flash has two types
of tween features: shape and motion. A shape tween allows you to move, scale, rotate,
change color, and morph only shapes drawn directly on the Stage. A motion tween
allows you to animate only symbol instances or grouped objects on the Stage. Let's
create a simple motion tween.
Exercise 3.1: Basic Motion Tween
Step 1: Getting started
Make sure the file 3_1_FramebyFrame.fla in the Chapter 3 folder is still open in Flash.
If you have been following along with the chapter, close out of the instance Timeline by
clicking on Scene 1. There are many Timelines within Flash. Every Flash file contains a
root Timeline (Scene 1). Every symbol has a unique Timeline. To see which Timeline is
currently being displayed on the Stage, look at the icons at the top of the Timeline.
Step 2: Create a starting point
You are going to animate the boy walking across the Stage. In Scene 1, click and drag
the boy to the left of the Stage. This will represent the first keyframe in the animation
(Figure 3.6). It will be the starting position for the boy.
Figure 3.6 Positioning the boy on the left side of the Stage