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Adobe Director 11 Tutorials
Sprites / Position Sprites
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Director 11 / Sprites / Position Sprites)
Continuing my review of working with Sprites in Director 11, let me now demonstrate how to position Sprites. The easiest way to position a Sprite on the Stage is to simply drag the Sprite into position using the black Arrow tool or selection tool like so. However, oftentimes you'll want to position a Sprite more precisely. So there's a variety of tools that will allow you to do this. Probably the easiest tool is to use the Property Inspector. Notice that if I select a Sprite, I have an X and Y settings here. So let's move this from 31 pixels from the top edge of the Stage to 50 pixels to the top edge. Notice that it moves down. Let's set the X direction or X dimensions. This is the distance from the left edge of the Stage from 185 to 200 pixels. Notice that it moves over to the right. You can also use the Tweak window to move Sprites several pixels at a time. Find the Tweak window by choosing Window, Align here. The Tweak window is usually paired up with the Align tab here. Notice that I can set my horizontal and vertical tweak values and then click on the Tweak button. Notice that it moves it three pixels, in this case, to the right and three pixels up. Again, this is reducing the number of pixels to the top edge of the Stage. So now it moved it seven pixels up and three pixels more to the right. I also have an alignment tab here. The alignment tab is useful for lining up sets of Sprites. So let me hold down the Shift Key and select these three Sprites; who, what and why. And then click on the align left edge button here on the Align tab and notice that moves everything over so that everything is lined up on the left and then I can use my arrow keys as well on my keyboard to move these up or down, left or right one pixel at a time. This is probably the most common way that I fine tune my Sprites is I use the arrow keys and then look at the X and Y settings here in the Property Inspector. You can also use the guides or grids that are available here under View. Guides and grid; let's show the grid. There's my grid there. I've also got some guides. Let's go ahead and show the guides. Now, you can set your grid by choosing View, Guides and Grid Settings and here's my Grid Color. The default is red but I can change that to any color using the chip here. I can make it either dots or lines. The dots are kind of hard to see. Let's change this back to red. Probably red is the most visible, especially if you're using dots. I can also adjust the width and height, the density of the grid. Let's make this 20 by 20 pixels, a higher density and let's make it visible or invisible by clicking on the visible option. I can also snap, have my Sprites snap to the grid there. Now, working with guides is a little bit trickier. They're hard to find. You go to View, Guides and Grid, Settings and that will bring out this Guides tab here in the Property Inspector and then just simply drag out some guides. Let's go ahead and make my grid invisible, either vertical or horizontal guides. I can bring out as many as I want and then I can line up my Sprites to those guides. You can also remove guides. And you'll see the problem is you lose your, your Guides tab there in the Property Inspector, but let's say I want to remove my guides, go to View, Guides and Grids, Settings, Remove All and that will remove those guides. I can also notice, change the color of my guides, make them visible or invisible, allow my Sprites to snap to the guides or lock the guides. If I lock these guides, notice that I can't move them. Unlocking them, I move my mouse over the guide, I get a double-headed arrow, either horizontal or vertical to move it in that direction. Notice I'm also getting a dimensions there, a location of my guide. That's 153 pixels from the edge. That's 150, actually these numbers represent the numbers of pixels from the left edge, from the vertical and from the top edge for the horizontal guides. So if I want to place my Sprite 140 pixels from the top edge, I can just snap it to that guide like so. Director places the image of a cast member on the Stage by specifying the location of its registration point. So for many cast members, such as bitmap or vector shape, the registration point is at the center of the bounding rectangle by default. For other types of cast members, the registration point is at the upper left-hand corner. But you can use these registration points in very interesting ways to change also the positions of your Sprites. Let me demonstrate with this and bring it on bitmap. Notice that if I double click on it, I bring up the Paint Window. Let me close out the Property Inspector. And if I zoom out on the Paint Window here, now, if I double click on the registration point here in the Paint Window, that will set that registration point by default in the center. But if I click elsewhere, notice that I can change the registration point and by doing so, I'm also changing the location on the Stage. The reason for that is the X and Y coordinates you set here in the Property Inspector are really the coordinates of the registration point. So if I change the location of my registration point, I'm thereby changing the location on the Stage as well. So you can use registration points to also change the position of your Sprites. And you can also change the appearance of Sprites on the Stage without affecting the cast members that are based on those Sprites. I should say the Sprites are based on the cast members. You can resize, rotate, skew, flip, apply new foreground and background colors to Sprites and much, much more. So let me now move on to the next move and go over in more detail 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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