Animation – Flash Shape Tweening Techniques

Would you like to move an object around while changing its shape? Are you interested in telling a story with stick figures? Are you looking for a cool rollover button effect that complements the look and feel of your site? Or how about a catchy transitional background, masking, or iris effect that captures your audience’s attention while enabling you to change sceneries or reveal or hide the details of an object?

You can do all this and more with shape tweens.

Shape tweens are similar to motion tweens. You create a shape in a keyframe on the Timeline, then you modify it or create a new shape in a subsequent keyframe and apply a shape tween. Macromedia Flash will generate the frames in between these two shapes to create your animation. The key difference between shape tweening and motion tweening is that you can’t apply shape tweens to groups or symbols; you first have to break them apart before you work with them.

This Macromedia Breeze presentation introduces you to the art of shape tweening. Shape tweening lets you change (or morph) the shape or color of one graphic into another. In addition to simple shapes and solid colors, you can also shape tween lines, gradients, and text. In this presentation, I’ll show you the possibilities and limitations of working with shape tweens in Macromedia Flash.

Watch the Breeze seminar (33 min)

Note: The sound in this live recorded seminar doesn’t start for about a minute — Chris was still getting set up! However, it does start, so please be patient.

Figure 1. Example of a gradiant shape tween