(Note: I finally worked the problem out, and explain the details at the bottom of the page in case anyone has the same problem.)
***************************
Hi-
I've had this copy of flash (5!) on my computer forever, and am finally being more aggressive about trying to get some of the animation features to work.
I went through the motion tweening project in the flash bible, which went great. Now I'm looking at the visual quickstart guide and trying to do shape tweening. It works fine if I'm trying to tween between shapes like ovals and whatever else I've drawn in the program, and "shapes" that have been converted from text are even ok. But I have a graphic, (the sillouhette of a pig - all one color and the color is the same as the shapes I'm working with) that is giving me trouble.
I "break it apart" twice, so that it looks like a regular shape, in the way that it's shaded and all that, but when I try to do the tweening, the previos shape morphs into a rectangle *containing* the pig. And in the last possible frame, the rectangle "poof" becomes the pig. Not what I was hoping for. Upon further inspection, I've found that if I choose the selection arrow and hover around the pig, that flash thinks this shape actually takes up that whole rectangular area (judging by where I get the little double arrow cross thingy) whereas, say with converted text, flash knows where the shaded areas are and where there's "nothing". Or where there's supposed to be!
I brought this black sillouhette in from photoshop, basically copied and pasted (a selected area) from a GIF file. Is there some way to get flash to see it as exactly the shape that it is, and not just as the rectangle that it sits in, at least for shape tweening purposes?
(I'm very new to this, so if anyone cares to respond, lots of detail and explaining your terms and where things are and all that is much appreciated.)
Thanks,
Amy
********************************
Well I got through this one, and in case anyone cares to know the details, here's what I did.
First, since the pig was acting like a rectangle, it occured to me that there was a white rectangle that I wasn't seeing with the white background. So I changed the background color and sure enough, there it was.
Then, setting the lasso tool with *only* the magic wand option on, I was able to select the white and delete it.
Then the morph worked.
Later I decided I wanted to fade the pig out, and while the letters would do this, the shape tween wouldn't do this for the pig. After stumbling around for a while, I found in the fill tab of the info panel that my black pig did not have a black fill. It had a pig fill
That is to say that the fill was the bitmap itself. (If I'd dragged out a big oval with this fill, I'd get pig wallpaper. So what I was looking at was a piece of that wallpaper, carefully cut out to display exactly one pig. Once I changed the fill to black, the tween let me fade it out.
Here's what I got:
http://www.hogritude.com/stuff/pigmorph.html
I hope everyone else is having as much fun
Amy
