Ray of Light Revisited
upuaut8 aka David H
Creating the
Lights: Step Two - Fills
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8a) |
Unlock the "lightL" layer, and lock all the rest.
Double click on the L itself, or it's green line
structure, to open up edit in place feature. |
|
8b) |
Select your paint bucket tool. Open your Mixer panel,
and your Fill panel. In the Fill panel, choose linear
gradient. A line of color, from black to white appears
below with two tabs. |
|
8c) |
Click on the left tab. You'll see the swatch to the
right turn to black. Click on that swatch and choose
color white.
In the Mixer panel, the swatch has changed from black
to white with your selection. In the "Alpha" field to
the right of the Mixer panel, type in 0% and hit
enter. |
|
8d) |
Click with the paint bucket inside the green line
structure. A gradient fill that looks like this should
have filled up the green polygon. If it didn't then
recheck the corners of the lines to make sure that it
makes a completely enclosed area. If you need to fix
one of the lines just move the black arrow tip near to
the end of the line. When it changes to an angle
symbol you can click and drag that end. Just move it
near to the other line's end point and it should snap
into place. Try filling it again with the paint
bucket. |
|
8e) |
Lock this layer and unlock the layer below this one,
go through each of the seven light layers that have
green line structures. When doing the fills on the
right of the "S", you will need to go back to your
fill panel. Grab the tab with alpha level 0% and pull
it about half way into the middle. Then grab the solid
white tab on the right, and pull it all the way to the
left, so that it sits where you just removed the other
one from. Then grab the alpha 0% one again and drag it
to the right hand side. One may also use the fill
transform tool settings to flip the fill in that
manner if you prefer. I do it there because I'm
already in that panel. All it is is a reversal of the
side which has the 0% alpha and the 100% alpha. |
Once
you've completed that, you should have something that
looks like this:
Take
a break. Leave this alone for an hour and go eat
something. It's about to get worse.
Intermission
dah dah da da dahhh dah
repeat.
Prepping Each Light Object for
Animation:
9a) The absolute first thing we do is
edit the centers of each of the light objects. A fatal
error many new to Flash make is this: They create a motion
tween set down a bunch of keyframes and then all of a
sudden want to alter the center point of the object. When
adding keyframes Flash will take the center attribute from
the previous keyframe each time. So you would need to go
to each keyframe and edit it's center IF you didn't heed
my advice now and do it in advance.
So...
| 9b)
|
Unlock the lightL layer
and lock all of the other layers. |
| 9c) |
Choose menu option
"Modify/Transform/Edit center". |
| 9d) |
Click once on the left
most letter, capital "L". Where it's center was, there
is a larger than usual cross hair. Grab this cross
hair and move it to the right most edge of the blue
bounding box which contains the whole lightL graphic.
It is better to overlap on the outside of the blue
bounding box than inside. But zoom in for this
operation. You want it as close to that blue line as
possible. |
| 9e) |
Lock this layer and
unlock the layer below this one. Repeat this process
on each light graphic symbol. |
Zoom in close if you need to.
Letters on the right of the "S" must have their centers
edited to the left hand side of the bounding box, not
the right.
Once you have altered all the center
points, UN-select everything by clicking once on a blank
part of the stage...make sure you click back to the
timeline of the movie clip lostSoulROL too. You can be
sure by looking for those tabs in the upper left corner
of the timeline. If there is only two tabs, the first
says, "Scene 1" and the second says lostSoulROL, then
you're in the right place. If you're not, just click on
the lostSoulROL tab, it will close any timelines other
than the one you want open.
9f) Save your work Ctrl+S,
or Ctrl+Shift+S
Tweening
For this part you can unlock all the
light layers. Keep the other ones locked for the moment.
| 10a) |
On the timeline select
the first frame of the lightL layer. Choose
menu option Insert/Create Motion Tween. Select
the first frame of the lighto layer and do the
same. Repeat for each light layer. |
| 10b) |
On the timeline select
frame 15 of the lightL layer. Choose menu
option Insert/Insert Keyframe. Select frame 15
of the lighto layer and do the same. Repeat for
each light layer. |
| 10c) |
On the timeline select
frame 35 of the lightL layer. Choose menu
option Insert/Insert Keyframe. Select frame 35
of the lighto layer and do the same. Repeat for
each light layer. |
Exception: On the lights layer,
just select frame 35 and use menu option Insert/Frame.
You'll see that all the light layers have blue
bars except that one which has a gray bar.
(Isn't that tedious?)
10d) Save your
work Ctrl+S, or Ctrl+Shift+S
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