Super Shaper

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Super Shaper

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When working with shapes, you may often need to bend them and twist them many different ways. If nothing else, it's just fun. To really mess with your shapes as if they were Play-Doh , select one, activate the Free Transform Tool, and then enable the Envelope option (the bottom right of the four options). Several more handles appear around your selected shape. Grab any one of them and drag to see its effects. Fooling around with these little guys can yield some really cool shapes , and the best part is that it all comes out smooth, as opposed to what you get when drawing with a mouse.

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Lock Up those Unruly Gradients

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Naturally, when you fill a shape using the Paint Bucket Tool, the fill is scaled to fit into that shape. This is not the only way. Draw a few shapes of various sizes in different places all over your stage. It doesn't matter which fill you use for now. Activate the Paint Bucket Tool and set your fill to a gradient or bitmap. With the Paint Bucket still active, turn Lock Fill on by pressing the right button in the option area of the Toolbar. Continue by clicking over each of the shapes on your stage and you'll see that the fill appears to spread over all the shapes instead of being scaled to fit each one. It's almost like creating a Mask, but much easier. The Lock Fill option is also available for the Paint Brush Tool, enabling you to paint as if revealing an image. Obviously this wouldn't be very helpful if you used a solid fill; it only works with a gradient or bitmap fill.

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Snap To it

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Sometimes, when you've created artwork, a symbol, or text on your Stage and you need to move it around, you want to do so freely , and other times you may want a little help from a friend. Flash allows for Object Snapping, which in effect will snap reference points of an object that you're dragging to reference points of other existing objects. This can aid you when trying to line things up or placing an object on a guide. To enable the feature, select the Arrow Tool from the Toolbar and then make sure the Snap to Objects modifier ( magnet ) is active. You can also enable this by going to View > Snap to Objects. Once active, you'll notice objects will snap to one another, indicated by a dark circle when you move one object close to another. For optimal use, always drag an object by its corners or center point.

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One at a Time, Ladies

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As you may have figured out, if you want to animate a symbol, you have to put that symbol on its own layer by itself and then add your Motion Tween. That's all fine and good, but what if you decide to animate after you already put fifteen symbols on the same layer? Do you take a deep breath as you create a new layer for each and then copy and paste them one at a time? Let's not and say we did. The easier way is to select all the instances you want to animate at the same time, then go to Modify > Timeline > Distribute to Layers (CTRL-SHIFT-D; CMD-SHIFT-D on Mac). This will put each item you selected on its own layer all by itself so that you can animate each one individually. Flash will even name each layer to match the symbol name of each selected item. Ahhh, life is good.

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Super Shaper

Super Shaper

Lock Up those Unruly Gradients

Snap To it

One at a Time, Ladies

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