Text That Morphs

[ LiB ]

You can use a Shape Tween when you want to move a shape across the Stage or to change a circle into a square. However, you can't apply a Shape Tween to text fields and have them morph from one word to another. Can you? Actually you can, but there are a few steps involved in doing so. As you may or may not know, a text field is not a shape, it's an object, and objects respond to Motion Tweens, not Shape Tweens, so it's time to be clever.

Add some text to the first frame of your Timeline. Now add a keyframe to frame 20 and change the text there to something different from what's on frame 1. Now (with the text field selected) press CTRL-B to Break Apart the text field. At first it will separate the word into individual letter blocks. Press CTRL-B again to break those letters into shapes. Repeat that step for the text on frame 1.

Finally create a Shape Tween to animate between the two keyframes. There it is, a neat little text effect commonly referred to as morphing.

[ LiB ]