Learning to Animate in Macromedia Flash MX

acromedia's Web site contains the prominent claim that 97.8 percent of all Web users already have Flash installed; in other words, those users can view Flash content without having to download and install a plug-in. This impressive statistic highlights the level of saturation that Flash media has achieved since its introduction more than six years ago. Flash animation is vector based, meaning that the images used in its creation are drawn with lines (vectors) and are resolution-independent, so their files are smaller than most animated GIFs, which use bitmapped images and are resolution-dependent. The first article in this series showed you the basic tasks involved in creating images using Flash MX's drawing tools. This article shows you how to bring your images to life through Flash's powerful animation features.

If you don't have Flash MX, you can download a free 30-day trial version that you can use to explore Flash's capabilities.

Setting Up the Flash MX Work Area and a New Document
Open Flash MX, click the Window menu and then click on the Panel Sets item. From the options available in Panel Sets, select Designer [1024 x 768]. As before, you will make extensive use of the Color Mixer, Tools, and the Timeline panels, but you will also be using the Properties panel at the bottom of the work area to alter your Flash movie properties as well as the objects you create.
 

The sample animation shows both Flash Shape Tweening and Motion Tweening.

<