how to draw this shape progressively ?

[pixeline]

hi all,

please take a look at this picture :

http://www.pixeline.be/images/b-shape.jpg

i want to have this B appear progressively, following the shape lines (starting from the top edge of the most vertical trait), like a ribbon that progressively becomes the B, so i figured out that i could do it with masking and motion tweening but i can't seem to make it work.

any idea on howto organize my timeline ?

thanks a lot,

alex

[tripdragon]

me to... anyclues ? Also I want to try the apple comerical of ipod shuffles arrows

[senocular]

you'll have to do it manually. Start with the original and erase a little bit from where you want it to end. Copy the keyframe and erase a little bit more. Repeat until you've erased the whole thing and select all the keyframes and reverse them. tah dah!

[pixeline]

no actually not. i 've managed to do it via quirky flashing :)

i created a "painter mc" which follows the desired motion path , and had a duplicate movie clip (holding a rectangle same color as main movie from which i removed the B shape) creating duplicates of this painter on enter frames. all this behind a cache showing only the part of the painter mc traces that i wanted.

so here was the structure, from top to bottom

|||||||||||||||CACHE LAYER ||||||||||||
|||||||||||||||AS SCRIPT ||||||||||||||||
|||||||||||||||MOTION GUIDE||||||||||||
|||||||||MOVING MC via motion tween ||||||

[lunatic]

Pretty cool! Care to post a sample fla and swf in the sources/experiments section?

@ Sen - your way sounds great for others who fear tweening along a path. :thumb:

[senocular]

I did this in about 2 minutes. looks fine to me.

[lunatic]

beautiful in its simplicity :pleased:

[pixeline]

I did this in about 2 minutes. looks fine to me.

wow ! can we see the .fla ? mine is pretty cpu intensive.

anyway, here is mine...

[senocular]

if you import the swf into a new fla, you'll have what my fla looks like. I just used the method I described above.

[pixeline]

ok then. nice result, but you don't have the color fading though :)

[tripdragon]

yikes. I thought for sure that it would be a little more dynamic than that. Like plot a point and turn points then lock another shape onto the line
http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/ads/

sigh here we go keyframe hell :D

[senocular]

you could make it more dynamic in Flash MX+, less so much in Flash 5 (unless you use duplicating clips which can be cpu intensive)

[pixeline]

you could make it more dynamic in Flash MX+

how ? i use FLash mx 2004 Pro, but still code in Flash 5 way *ashamed*