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Adobe Director 11 Tutorials
Animation / Tweening the Path of a Sprite
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Director 11 / Animation / Tweening the Path of a Sprite)
In the previous movie, you might have noticed that when I set up my tween animations in Director by changing the properties of two keyframes, that I had this path that appeared when I clicked on the Sprite on the Stage. These Sprite paths are the lines that Director displays on the Stage to show the movement of a Sprite. You can see that these are always set up when I create a tween animation. If I unhide one of these other channels, when I click on the Sprite and I move the path of that Sprite, actually I need to click on this one here because that, notice that that Sprite span only has one keyframe. So I can not set up a tween animation there. So let's hide channel number two and open up channel number three and now if I move my Sprite, you have that little path there. Notice that I can open that up and that will display the actual movement or path movement of that Sprite span. Now, Sprite paths are controlled by the Sprite Overlay settings dialog box. You can change the settings to make the paths appear for all Sprites, for selected Sprites or only when the pointer rolls over a Sprite. You do that by selecting View, Sprite Overlay, Settings. Notice that I have show info and show paths. I can also just turn off the paths completely. Notice that now you don't see them. Let's go back to channel number one. I think that's the best example of these Sprite paths. Notice that now that it's invisible, you can always go back to the Sprite Overlay and show the paths. There's my path. And you can also modify the settings here by choosing settings and I can display the paths when I rollover the Sprite, when I select the Sprite or all the Sprites all the time. Let me demonstrate how to display a rollover. Notice that when I roll over the Sprite it appears, the path appears. Sometimes if you have a lot of Sprites on the Stage, showing them all the time can be distracting, so sometimes you just want to see the path when you rollover the Sprite. Let's go ahead and for this demonstration now leave my paths for any Sprite that's selected. Now, in addition to showing you the path of the animation, what's nice about these Sprite paths is that you can tween a Sprite directly on the Stage by editing the Sprite's path. The keyframes here are represented by filled circles. The first keyframe is green. The second keyframe is red. So I can modify the starting and ending points of this path by modifying the actual keyframes right there on the Stage. This is a very visual way of seeing how the animation will appear when the movie is played back. Now, where this really comes into use is that you can also insert keyframes, additional keyframes in any additional frames where you want the Sprite's animation path to change. For example, right here I have a linear path, but if I want to make that less linear, I can go to frame ten and insert another keyframe and notice that I get another colored circle here and now I can modify the path so that it's not a straight line and I can add as many keyframes as I desire and each one will have a colored circle on my path, making it very easy to modify the path. Notice that my intermediary keyframes are now yellow, but my first keyframe is always green, my last keyframe is always red and using these paths you could very quickly generate sophisticated movement paths for your Sprites. Let me go ahead and take my opacity of that last keyframe and increase it back to 100 so we can see that path a bit better. Now, to change the degree of curvature between keyframes, you can use your modify, Sprite, Tweening dialog here, curvature can be normal, very linear or very extreme curvature. Let's turn it all the way up to extreme and then notice that the path here is much more curvy versus if I choose Modify, Sprite, Tweening and do a very linear curvature. Click OK. Notice that now I have straight lines between each keyframe. So you have quite a bit of control over these path tweens which are probably the most common that you'll use in Director and that's why you have a very sophisticated Sprite Tweening dialog box here for setting the degree of curvature. This setting here, continuous at end points, makes the Sprite move in the same direction at the beginning and the end. This creates a circular motion. Little bit unusual there. Probably a better way to demonstrate that is to move this end point here. Kind of interesting effect there. Notice that it's moving in the same direction. Let's go ahead and make that last Sprite there, that last keyframe a little bit bigger so that we can actually see this better. And if I go ahead and press the enter key to play this, you can see that it goes in a circular motion and again, that's because I chose the modify, Sprite, Tweening setting here. I need to select a Sprite first, Modify, Sprite, tweening. They continuous at end points will create a circular motion there. Well, you may have noticed that the speed of my Sprite animation stayed the same. You can modify that by choosing the Ease-In and Ease-Out settings and changing it here. So let me now move on to the next movie and demonstrate how to accelerate and decelerate your Sprite animations using the Ease-In and Ease-Out settings here in the Sprite tweening dialog.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Director 11 |
| Author: | James Gonzalez |
| SKU: | 33901 |
| ISBN: | 1-934743-84-4 |
| Release Date: | 2008-07-31 |
| Duration: | 9.5 hrs / 107 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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