Motion Presets
       by kirupa  |  3 December 2008

In the previous page, you took an animation and saved it as a motion preset. In this page, let's look at how to use your saved motion preset in a new file.

Using a Motion Preset
To use a motion preset, first, go ahead and create a new Flash CS4 file by going to File | New. In your new file, draw a blue square:

[ create a new document and draw a blue square ]

Select your newly drawn square with your mouse, and make sure you have your Motion Presets panel displayed. Inside your Motion Presets panel, right click on the Ease and Slide entry and select Apply at current location:

[ right click on the preset you wish to add and select Apply at current location ]

Once you have done that, your square is automatically converted into a symbol and your earlier animation is applied to it. Besides pressing Ctrl + Enter to preview your motion preset applied to your square, you can tell by looking at the tween that mysteriously appears in your timeline, and you can also tell by looking at the keyframes that appear on your stage indicating something is going on:

[ your earlier animation has now been applied ]

The animation you saw on the previous page has pretty much been transferred over in its entirety. The only variation is that, instead of your animation working on an image, it is working on the blue square you created earlier.

Displaying the Motion Preset Preview
If you look in your Motion Presets panel and select any of the already-provided presets, notice that you see a preview of what the preset actually looks like:

[ all of the default presets display a preview of what the preset will be like ]

If you go back and select your custom Ease and Slide preset, you don't see such a preview as you did for any of the built-in presets. The reason is that the preview is actually a SWF file that lives in the same location as the preset. The preview is not something that is automatically generated based on the preset you have selected.

To add your own preview, first save this animation that you currently have open and publish it to create a SWF file. If you have been following along, this SWF file will be nothing more than your blue square with the Ease and Slide preset applied to it. Once you have published, go to your publish location on your hard drive to see your SWF file:

[ when you publish, the HTML and SWF file will be generated for you ]

Copy your SWF file and go to the special Motion Presets folder found in your Application Data location for Flash CS4. It isn't the easiest of locations to find, but you can access that folder via the following path (on Vista): C:\Users\< user name >\AppData\Local\Adobe\Flash CS4\en\Configuration\Motion Presets

In that folder, you will see all of the custom Motion Presets that you created via the Motion Presets panel. At the very least, you will see your Ease and Slide preset displayed:

[ all of your custom presets are displayed! ]

Paste the SWF file that you copied into this location. Once you have pasted it, rename this SWF file from whatever it was to Ease and Slide. Essentially, the SWF file should match the name of the preset you are creating the preview for:

[ you now have a motion preset and a preview SWF file bearing the same name ]

Once your SWF file's and the motion preset's names match, you are all set. Go back to Flash, look in your Motion Presets panel, and select your Ease and Slide motion preset. Unlike before where you didn't see anything in the preview area, you will now see the SWF file you just pasted and renamed appear:

[ your Ease and Slide preset now shows a preview ]

The thing to note is that Flash does not check to see if the preset animation actually contains a copy of the preset that you applied. You could have placed a SWF file of a dancing banana, renamed it to Ease and Slide, and seen the dancing banana animation appear as a preview for your motion preset.

Conclusion
As you can see, motion presets are a nice addition to Flash. Much of this is possible because the default animation system is now property-based. This allows you to alter the properties of an object where the object does not have to be anything specific but a symbol. This means you can easily separate the properties and what time they are changed from the actual object itself. If you look at your motion preset file in Notepad, you will basically see an XML-view of what I just described - a list of properties, their values, and times.

Just a final word before we wrap up. What you've seen here is freshly baked content without added preservatives, artificial intelligence, ads, and algorithm-driven doodads. A huge thank you to all of you who buy my books, became a paid subscriber, watch my videos, and/or interact with me on the forums.

1 | 2