In this tutorial, I will talk/write about more advanced motion tweens; I will explain two things here, editing motion tweens and using motion tweens for rotation.
EDITING MOTION TWEENS
Open up a new flash document, name is not important
Draw a square on frame 1
Create a keyframe on frame 10
On frame 10, move the square to a different spot on the stage
Create a motion tween between the 2 keyframes. If you don't know how to, refer to tutorial 1 of my flash tutorials.
It should look something like this so far:
Test your movie, the square moves and stops as expected
Now, click on a frame between 1-9 and look down at the properties panel and click edit:
Now, it should come up with a screen like this:
Here you can edit the motion tween progress, the dot at the lower left corner represents the start/first frame of tween and the top right dot represents the end/last frame of tween
You can click and drag the line between the 2 dots to edit the progress of the motion tween. Edit the line so it looks like this:
Click OK and test your movie
You will see that the tween starts off slow then speeds up. Back at the tween editing screen, the X axis represents the frames in the tween, in this case 10 and the Y axis represents the progress in the tween. So, we made it so between frames 1 - 4.75 it will only do 20% of the tween, and then between frames 4.75 and 10 it will complete the tween but since there's less frames means that it will have to complete it faster.
Any major mistakes can be fixed by pressing the reset button
Now, back at the editing screen, make it look like this:
Click OK and test your movie
You will find that in frames 5.25 - 6 it will go backwards. Editing tweens is a nice function and is very handy.
USING TWEENS FOR ROTATION
Open up a new flash document (discard the one you used in the editing motion tweens tutorial)
Draw a square in the first keyframe
Now, draw an arrow within that square with a different colour to the square using the line tool (Hotkey N). It will look something like this:
Now, select BOTH the square and the arrow using the select tool by clicking the mouse and dragging it over the 2 objects
For now press F8, select movie clip if it isn't already selected and name it box and press OK. Doing this will convert the box and arrow into a movie clip. Since it is now a grouped object you cannot use shape tweens with this, but it doesn't matter, I will talk about movie clips in another tutorial but for now, just do this.
It should look something like this:
Now, make a key frame at frame 10 and create a motion tween
Now, at frame 10, using the transformation tool, rotate the box movie about 90 degrees clockwise. This is what the box should look like now:
Now, play your movie by pressing Control and Enter/return and you will see the movie clip will rotate 90 degrees clockwise. Typical, you might be thinking that it's just a motion tween, but what if you wanted it to rotate anticlockwise?
Click on the motion tween (the arrow) in the timeline and then look at the properties panel. Look for this:
Now, to the right of "Rotate" click and select CCW (counter clockwise)
Now beside the CCW change the 1 to a 0
Now test your movie, you will find out that the box will now rotate anticlockwise
The number I just told you to change to 0, change it back to 1
Now test your movie
You will see that it will rotate anticlockwise, but it will add an extra spin on it. So if you put 5 in that field, it will add 5 extra spins etc.
Congratulations, you have now edited a box's motion tween and made one rotate anticlockwise
NOTE: You can also change the direction to go clockwise and also add extra spins, this can become handy if you want something to spin one way, but it's going the other way. To make a motion tween take longer to complete, just simply add more frames within the motion tween and to make it shorter, remove frames.
