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Adobe Director 11 Tutorials
Sprites / Selecting Sprites
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Director 11 / Sprites / Selecting Sprites)
Most of your work in Director will involve working with Sprites, so let me focus in a bit more in the next several movies on methods and techniques for working with your Sprites, starting with selecting Sprites. Before you can edit or move a Sprite, you first must select it. You can select Sprites, frames within Sprites and groups of Sprites in several ways, so let me review these in detail. You'll use the Arrow tool on the Tool Palette to select Sprites before most operations. Notice that when selecting a Sprite on the Score it also selects it on the Stage. And vice versa. Notice that this Sprite here is this, represented by this Sprite span there in the Score. You can also select Sprites with the rotate and skew tool to enable rotation and skewing right here. It's next to the black arrow or pointer or Selection tool. Notice that I can move my mouse cursor around the edge of the Sprite bounding box to skew or rotate the Sprite. Now, when selecting Sprites, you'll often want to select a certain frame or range of frames within the Sprite instead of the entire Sprite span. Let's choose my Arrow tool to demonstrate this technique. When you make certain changes to a frame within a Sprite, it becomes a selectable object called a keyframe. You can see some keyframes here, the open circles. I'll be talking more about key frames when we get into the animation section of this tutorial. Notice that I can select a particular keyframe and that selects just that frame. You can add keyframes to your Sprite spans by choosing Insert, Keyframe from the main menu. That will add a keyframe to the currently selected layer or channel here where that channel intersects the current time indicator. So I'm going to add a key frame right to that particular frame right there by choosing insert keyframe and there it is. Now, notice that a selected Sprite appears on the Stage with either a single border or a double border. Here is a double border indicating that I've selected the entire Sprite span. If I select just a single keyframe or a frame, I get a single border. Perhaps this Sprite is a better example of this. There's my double border. The entire Sprite span has been selected. If I select just a keyframe, I get only a single border. Now, you may have noticed that when you select a Sprite on the Stage, the default is to select the entire Sprite span, but you can change that by choosing Edit, Preferences and then choosing the Sprite option. Turn off the entire Sprite and turn on the current frame only under Stage selection. Click OK and now notice that I'm only selecting a single frame when I select the Sprite on the Stage. In this case it's a keyframe because my current time indicator is over those keyframes. If I move my current time indicator to, like, say to frame 70, click on my Sprite, notice that only frame 70 is selected for that channel. Notice that when you select the Sprites here in the Score, I still get the entire Sprite span. Most often you'll want to work with the default setting for your Sprites and that is select the entire Sprite when I click on it on the Stage. Now, to select a contiguous range of Sprite either on the Stage or on the Score, select a Sprite at one end of the range and then SHIFT+CLICK a Sprite at the other end of the range. For example, I can select this Sprite span, hold down the Shift Key and select that entire range of Sprites. You can also drag a marquee like so using the Arrow tool around that range of Sprites. To select Sprites that are not contiguous, you'll want to control click on the Windows Operating System or COMMAND+click on the Mac to select those Sprites. So here on the windows operating system I'm holding down the CONTROL Key and I'm selecting every other Sprite span including span, spans over here in this other block of Sprites further down the time line. Now, as I mentioned, you can also select individual frames by clicking on the keyframes. But if you want to select a single frame that's not a keyframe, on the Windows Operating System hold down the ALT key and then click and that will select an individual frame both on the Score and the Stage. On the Mac you'll want to option click to select only the current frame of this Sprite. Notice that when you do that the Sprite appears on the Stage with a single border. There's my single border there. Single border here and single border there. So these are just cues that Director is giving you to let you know what's going on either on the Stage or in the Score here. Now you can also name Sprite channels. You probably don't want to stick with the generic numbered names. Simply double click on that channel and type in the name there. You can see that says text. Let's go ahead and close this down and magnify several times here to 400 percent and now let's go ahead and double click on this one and type in title. And there's the title definition. You'll probably want to label your channel names. It helps you organize your Director projects better. This will expedite your work when authoring and managing many composite layers as well. When authoring sites in Lingo are JavaScript syntax, you often must work in a particular channel or manage several different channels and you'll manage them by the names. So there you have a thorough review of labeling your channels and selecting Sprites, as well as Sprite spans and individual frames and key frames. Let me now move on to the next movie and review how to position Sprites and how to change the appearance of your Sprites.
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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