Custom Easing in Flash

Flash offers you a few methods for controlling the easing of your animation. The first uses the Ease slider in the Property inspector. This is how you did it in previous versions of Flash. The second method uses the Custom Ease In/Ease Out dialog box, which is available only for motion tweening animation. (The third way involves ActionScript, whether you use the Tween class/easing methods or your own equations.)

When you click the Edit button next to the Ease slider (you must first click a frame on the Timeline that contains a motion tween), the Custom Ease In/Ease Out dialog box appears with a graph that provides independent control over the symbol properties such as the position, rotation, scale, color, and filters, all of which change during the motion tweening.

Note: When you apply custom easing on your symbol, the Ease value in the Property inspector displays --.

The Custom Ease In/Ease Out dialog box includes the following features:

• The Ease In/Ease Out graph lets you control the easing of your tweening by editing the curve through the control points, as I discuss in the next section.
• The Use One Setting for All Properties option uses one curve setting for all object properties (selected by default).
• The Property pop-up menu becomes active when you deselect the Use One Setting for All Properties option; it allows you to specify a separate curve setting for each of the position, rotation, scale, color, and filters properties of the symbol.
• The Play and Stop buttons let you preview the curve effect on your animation.
• The Reset button reverts the velocity curve to its default position.

This article concentrates on the Ease In/Ease Out graph, which is the powerhouse behind the easing feature in Flash 8.