FrozenHaddock Tutorials: Tweening

In this tutorial you will learn you to use flash's tweening techniques to create
smooth animation. There are two types of tweens, shape and motion tweening.

First of all there are a few rules you'll need to learn before you start tweening.
First of all, you can only shape tween shapes, and motion tween movie clips.
Secondly, everything on a shape tween layer is tweened, so keep things on
several layers. Only one movie clip is allowed in one motion tween, for multiple
motion tweens you need more than one layer.

Shape Tweening

Right, lets start with the simpler of the tweens, the shape tween. This is mostly
considered crude for advanced animation, but can produce a quick and easy
effect when needed.

To start off you'll need to draw something to shape tween.

For the sake of this tutorial, I have drawn this face. Now, you'll need to insert
a new keyframe further along the timeline.

Now on this frame, change the posistion and/or colours of your shape.

Now you need to select all the frames involved in the tween, open the properties
bar and change the tween box to shape.

Your frames should now look like this.

And your shape should now be smoothly changing colour, if you changed the
posistion too, then it will move. However for smooth movement, a motion tween
or motion guide are recommended.

There, a nice, quick and easy to make effect for use on basic animation projects.
Now lets move onto Motion tweens.

Motion Tweening

Motion tweening is much more advanced than shape tweening, and has a lot
more rules associated with it. However, these are useful, as there is much
more you can do with one of these tweens.

Firstly, again, you will need to draw the thing to tween. I have used the same
face as in the shape tweening tut.

This time you will need to convert this shape into a movie clip. To do this, select
the shape, and hit F8. Make sure you select Movie Clip under the behaviour.

Now it is converted, It should show a blue square around it when selected.

Now, as in the shape tween, insert a keyframe further along the timeline. Here
I have inserted it on 20.

On this new Keyframe, you need to move your movie clip to another posistion.

Now, select your frames, right click, and select create motion tween.

Your timeline should now look like this.

You should now have a nice clean movement. Note, we did this with movement,
but you can use things like rotation, alpha, size, tint and flash 8+ filters. These
are very useful. If you want more advanced control over your movement, have a
go at motion guides.

Written by: TazzyDevil XIII
Website: http://www.frozenhaddock.co.uk