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Fill Techniques - Radial Fill
by kirupa

In case you stumbled here without having first completed the second page, please click here and finish the second page. It contains some useful information that you may find useful in this page.

Method the Third: The Radial Fill
The radial fill is different from the linear gradient fill you used. Instead of horizontally changing the fill color, the radial fill changes the color radially - in a circular fashion.

First, ensure that your Color Mixer Panel is displayed. Select the drop-down menu in the Color Mixer panel and select Radial:

[ the Color Mixer panel ]

Once you select Radial, you will find a gradient color slider similar to that for the Linear Gradient Fill. After you have selected your colors, make sure you apply this Fill Style to your rectangle.

Your rectangle may look similar to the following image:

[ notice the radial changes in the color ]

Changing and adding the colors is very similar to the method used to change or add colors in the Linear Gradient method. Therefore, I will not be going into greater detail.

After adding and rearranging the colors around on the slider, the following image displays a section of the rectangle along with a small portion of the Mixer Panel:

[ notice the different colors in the rectangle corresponding the colors chosen ]

The Fill Transform Tool

Now would be a good time to introduce the important Fill transform tool. While you learned how to add different fill effects, Flash includes a method where you can modify the fill's properties:

Click the Fill Transform button from the toolbox:

[ the fill transform tool ]

After the Fill Transform tool has been clicked, click on your object (rectangle). You should see something similar to what is displayed in the following image:

[ the fill properties for the Radial Fill ]

You can scale, resize, and move the fill property around. Notice that the the fill color shifts, rotates, scales, and moves according to what you modify in the Fill Property:

[ notice how the original fill style has changed ]

The Fill Transform tool can be used on the Linear, Gradient, and Bitmap fill types. Of course, since Solid fill cannot be modified, the Fill Transform tool is of no use there.

Tip

If you don't see the various Fill Transform features when you select your object after pressing the Fill Transform button, no need to worry. Simply set your zoom to something like 50% or 25% and scale the Fill Transform circle or rectangle to a relatively appropriate size. You can zoom back to 100% after you have scaled the Fill Transform handlers down!