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| Load,
Unload and Chain Wild FX Flash Text
Effects in Macromedia Flash 5 |
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| Contents
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| Part
2 |
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| Gedunken,
Background, and Heavy Chat |
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| Great! That is pretty easy! What's
not so obvious is that loading these
two little animations into Flash is almost
as easy. Before we go into the loading,
let's talk about how Flash treats its
own movies. |
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| One of the interesting features of
Flash is that it can't import a Flash
4 or Flash 5 movie correctly! It can
however import a Flash 3 movie as expected.
If you want, try it - try opening a new
Flash 5 movie, choosing Import from
the Open menu, and selecting our
Flash 4 animation, ani2.swf. All you
get is a layer of keyframes. It will
have some underlines and dots, but nothing
else. The dots you see are empty movie
clip instances created by Wild FX when
it made the effect. Test this
movie. Nothing. Now try it with ani1.swf.
You'll see you get nice keyframes with
all the text for each one on the stage.
And when you Test it, you see
the animation play nicely. |
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| Even though as designers we are used
to Import to bring files into most of
our applications, like PhotoShop, Quark,
etc., you can see it's not going to work
with Flash 4 effects. Note also that
Flash has no equivalent of Place either.
So the habits of mind we designers normally
have should change a bit for Flash when
working with our Wild FX effects. |
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| How to get our effects reliably into
our final Flash project? By using the
Flash Actionscript command, loadMovie.
When loading movies into Flash you have
two choices: to load into a movie clip,
or into a level. Levels in Flash are
similar to z-index layers in an html
page; or the layers of a PhotoShop file;
just as a web page can have many layers,
each with its own content, and each of
which can be manipulated, so does Flash
have these levels. The problem is that
just tossing the Wild FX animation into
a level in Flash makes it harder to manipulate
than if you use a movie clip. That's
why the Wild FX help recommends using
movie clips. But we'll do it both ways;
then you can see how they work and use
the one most appropriate for your situation. |
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| Let's go to Flash now and load our
two Wild FX animations. Don't let your
fear of scripting overwhelm you, if you
have it - and many of us do! It's not
as bad as it looks at first. Remember,
our goal is to load ani1.swf into a movie
clip, have it set a variable when it
gets to the end of itself, unload it
from the movie clip using that variable,
load ani2.swf, and then unload that after
a certain time has past. We're doing
this to show two things simultaneously
- how to load and unload things with
a variable, and also how to use Flash's
getTimer function to do something. Both
of these are handy things to know! They
are common strageties you'll often use
when designing your own movies. |
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This tutorial was written by FR Elkins.
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3 | Page 4 |
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Wildform, Inc | Policies | Contact
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| ©2010
Wildform, Inc | Policies | Contact
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| Wildform
provides a 100% satisfaction guarantee on all our Flash software.
If you are not completely satisfied with our Flash multimedia software
for any reason you may request a refund within 15 days
of purchase.
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