Eric's Project #3

I decided to animate my Roots exhaust pump from my previous project.

I applied my first Motion Tween to the Yellow Argon Atom as it enters the pump. I used the custom easing to make it start slow, speed up as it got sucked in, then slow as it awaited the proper position of the pump vane. I also changed the y-scale to the custom easing to give some sense of motion to the spherical shape as it accelerated and decelerated.

For the second Motion Tween the same atom is exiting the pump. I used the Fly-out-left motion preset and changed the Simple (Medium) Ease from negative to positive so that it started fast instead of slow. I also added x-scale value and alpha so that it kind of fades out and goes away as it exits. I want your attention to go to the blob at this point.

I can't say I have had much of a chance to look at the tutorials. I just don't have enough computer face time to do my work, and my Flash project, and sit and watch tutorials. (I do not have, nor want a computer in my house.) What I have seen seems redundant with the class and I haven't found them to provide me much benefit. I imagine they might help me after this course is over and I get stuck on something.

Completing the project: As soon as I get the assignment I create a storyboard form leaving space to draw pictures, and also write key instructions from the assignment. I leave space around these to write down brainstorm ideas of how to complete the assignment within a theme, while also sketching how the images will look.

I thought I'd animate my whole project #2, but the shape tween difficulties described next caused me to pare that down to just the pump.

This is where things got sticky - I didn't feel like I had enough understanding of the tween types until late in the game, which gave me little computer time to play/fight with Flash. In particular Shape gave me problems. I just couldn't make it do anything useful for me. The morphing just doesn't work the way I need it to, and I basically ended up breaking everything into keyframes and doing frame-by-frame animation. That blob you see was originally a water molecule, but Frame had no clue how to morph it, and ultimately it stopped letting me edit the object. I even tried to leave it in just to show how screwed up it got, but by the time I finished, somewhere along the way Flash deleted the tweens! Even the blob was a struggle to get to behave. I just don't see this thing being useful to me.

Half way through that fiasco I worked on the classic and motion tweens. The classic tween is the Argon atom as it goes through the vanes. I got the impression you can't put a classic tween on the same layer as a motion tween, so there are actually two layers for the argon. This all worked pretty smoothly once I figured that out. The rotating vanes are also motion tweens - very easy to do and synchronize.

I am NOT happy about having to do another shape tween....