Basic animation

I am just starting with basic animation. I took a simple rectangle and moved and resized over ten frames. As soon as I previewed it moved smoothly - very exiting.

I made a more complex shape from several simple shapes and moved that around over ten steps and it just jumps from one to the other. In both cases I named the shape.

Using Photo and Graphic Designer 2013. Any ideas why a simple shape seems to tween and a more complex one doesn't?

Thanks

Phil

Hi Phil,
You can change the size, position and colour of the shape but you can't change the shape, it won't tween as you've discovered. You can use basic shapes to look like it's one shape cloning into a 2nd shape but it's just a cheat really.

Here's a quick example. HERE

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Egg Bramhill

Here's a quick example. HERE

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Egg that is great :)

Brilliant, Egg.

Hi,
Seems you the Master Egg...great animation...
Jim

Well done Egg. That shows why I always liked your tutorials and learned so much from you (and Gary), my mentors.

:)

Egg-cellent example.

-g

very good egg :)

I did a quick psuedo-morph test in xdpx - but it does not work properly in flash [have I ever mentioned how much I dislike flash? I believe I have] - but works fine as avi... the xdpx export was a bit big, so I've squeezed it down to just under the forum limit in camtasia [it's 487KB, forum limit for this file-type 500KB]

Responding to the OP - you should be able to animate a more complex shape - merged and grouped. What you cannot animate is sub-object features (e.g. control points) and unsupported effects.

Try these steps:

New animation
Create complex shape
Select all and group (if necessary)
Name object
Copy frame
Adjust scale, colour, rotation on copied frame
Repeat "copy frame and adjust" ad nausea
Play animation

My guess is that somehow the name is lost between frames of your animation - hence the jumping. If you plan your animation and only copy frames then the tweening of scale, rotation and colour should all work.

you haven't mentioned transparency changes... and as I recall these don't work for a group tween.... but that said, yes, jumping, is likely a naming problem I'd agree

Because Adobe Systems bought the swf technology when they acquired Macromedia (who bought the technology from a small start-up company), they have their "rules" as to what animation types for certain objects can and cannot be done.

And Xara's animation engine is based around SWF standards, regardless of whether you export to GIF, swf, or AVI. When you "break a rule", such as changing a gradient from frame to frame, Xara lets you know (sort of) that it's ceased to be a supported tweening object and it will be written as a key frame that doesn't tween with the following frame but rather just sits there for its allotted duration and hence some animations are large, and look a little choppy.

If you want to do tweening Xara-style (and Adobe style), I wrote a long list of what you can and cannot expect from a Xara animation

here a while back. Scroll down to the "Read Me First" section—the text is live so you can copy it to a local document and refer to it in the future.

My Best,

Gary