Adobe Director 11 Tutorials
Sprites / Creating Sprites
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Director 11 / Sprites / Creating Sprites)
Now that you have a solid foundation on the various types of cast members you can work with in Director, let's now shift our focus to Sprites, as mentioned previously. Cast members that have been placed on the Stage become Sprites. The formal definition of Sprites from the Director documentation is Sprite is an object that controls when, where and how cast members appear in a Director movie. Multiple Sprites can use the same cast member. They can also switch cast members assigned to a Sprite as the movie plays. Use the Stage to control where a Sprite appears and use the Score to control when it appears in your movie. So the key here is you'll use the Cast Window to display which Sprite you want by dragging and dropping it right on the Stage like so. You'll use the Stage here to place the cast member or the Sprite in position; in other words, where it goes depends on where you drag it here in the Stage. When it appears in your movie is done using the Score and the Score, as you know, as I've covered previously, runs in time from the left to the right so things that are placed over to the right in a higher numbered frame appear later in your movie, unless you're using some Lingo script to jump the playback head back and forth. Now, you'll notice right away that Sprites appear on the Stage in a stacking order according to the channel in which they are placed. So for example, you'll notice, if I move my Cast Window down, that my text Sprite is on top of both the blue rectangle and the green circle and that the green circle is on top of the blue rectangle. So you'll notice that that stacking order is based on essentially the reverse order here in the Score. It's a little bit confusing in that the numbers represent the stacking order. So the blue rectangle is on the bottom. It's in channel number one. The green circle is channel number two above that and the text is on top of both of those. There's my black rectangle. I haven't labeled that in the Cast Window. That's why it says number ten there. That's in position number 10. Notice that all these work in conjunction, so if I go to position number ten and now re-label this black rectangle, spell it correctly here, notice that the black rectangle label appears in the Sprite span here in the Score, making things a little bit easier to understand. So I recommend always labeling all your cast members. But notice that the stacking order is dictated by the channel number and it's essentially in reverse order here. You notice that the blue rectangle is on top, but it's in channel number one. A little bit confusing. I probably should be numbered in reverse order; one on the bottom. But one is on the bottom there and then four here is this black rectangle. Although it's in the bottom of the stack order here in the Score, it's actually on top of the other Sprites. Now, a movie can contain as many as one thousand Sprite channels and you'll set this in the Movie tab of the Property Inspector. So I brought my Property Inspector up here and notice if I click on the Stage anywhere, there's a Movie tab and there's a channel setting right here. The default is 150 channels but you can set this up as high as 1,000 Sprite channels. You can also modify Sprite properties using the Property Inspector. In fact, a lot of learning Director is about learning the various ways to manipulate Sprites and that includes manipulating their properties here in the Property Inspector. You can notice adjust the Sprite's name, location, size, ink, opacity here and quite a bit more. So let me now move on to the next movie and introduce you to manipulating Sprite properties using the Property Inspector.
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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