Moving Objects Along a Path (Page 2) - By Blue_Chi
Creating the Animated Object
For the sake of our tutorial here, use the "Rectangle tool" to draw a small thin rectangle. Make sure that you are drawing this in the guided layer (Layer 2) and not in the motion guide layer. You will have to convert the object into a symbol to be able to animate it, you do this by selecting your drawing and pressing F8 in Windows, or simply going to Modify > Convert To Symbol. You may convert your basic shape to either a Movie clip or a Graphic.
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Rectangle Tool |
Object to be animated |
Select the shape on stage and then convert it to a symbol |
Creating a Motion Tween
Before we start, make sure that your rectangle is located at one end of the path; once you move your object near the path it should automatically snap to the tip. Start now by adding frames in both layers up to frame 20. You do this by right-clicking frame 20 and clicking on 'Insert Frame'. Repeat the process for the other frame as well for our guide is required to exist in all the frames of the animation for the object to follow it.
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Move our rectangle to the tip of the path |
Insert a new frame in frame 20 |
You will have to insert frames in both layers. |
We now have to change the tween type of our animation to "Motion". You will have to click once on frame 1 of Layer 2 and access the Properties Panel, if it is not already at the bottom of the screen, you can show it by going to "Window > Properties". In the properties panel, simply change the tween type to Motion. Make sure to check the "Orient to Path" option so that your object rotates along the curves of the path that you have created earlier.
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Make sure that you are configuring Layer 2 and not Layer 1 |
Change the tween type of Motion, if you are interested in
Shape tweening you can read this tutorial |
The "Orient to path" option makes your object rotates along the shape of the path |
Everything is now set, you now have to add keyframes to make the animation. Right-click frame 20 of Layer 2 and select "Insert Keyframe". Now move our rectangle to the other end of the path, it should snap to it. Hit "Enter" on your keyboard to see the animation rolling.
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Make sure that you are configuring Layer 2 and not Layer 1 |
The "Orient to path" option makes your
object rotates along the shape of the path |
The object would usually follow the shortest path towards to the ending point, this becomes essential in making animations that loop around a connected shape. For example, if you wanted to create an animating object that revolves around a circle, you may be tempted to use three keyframes, the first at the starting point, the second half between the ending and starting point, and the last point at the end point, which is the same as the starting point. Flash takes the shortest path towards the target, which would be the same for both the first and second half of the animation making the object only go along only half the circle. To solve this problem you would have to use at least four keyframes distributed along the path to guide the object on which direction to take.
One last point to remember, guide layers are not viewable in the output SWF movie, if you want your path to be seen in the flash movie itself, you would have to duplicate the path onto a normal layer.
This concludes this tutorial, if you have any questions please visit the O3D forum.
- End of Tutorial