Now, as what we know about making tweens, let us take a look at something that I think you will find it very interesting. I would like to take a look at one of the movie clips that we have created, the head thing that is bobbing around the top of our robot head. Now so far, we have made movie clips in order to group objects together, in order to get reusability, we got a whole bunch of extra settings in the property panel, and now we have seen that we are using them to create motion tweens.
Well, let us take a look inside that movie clip one more time. Now, we have seen how to edit them. I can either double click it on the stage or I can double it on the library. So, I am just going to pull up that object by itself. And what I want to concentrate on right now is not changing the object as it appears on the stage but looking up here to the top and taking a look at the timeline panel. What we are seeing here is that our movie clip is not just a group. It is actually a movie. It has its own set of layers and its own timeline and inside this timeline, we can use all the same rules that we just learned on the main scene one timeline. We can use frames, keyframes and most importantly, we can use shape and motion tweens as well.
To try this out, I would like to add a little animation to our head thing. The first thing I want to do is I want to take the graphics we have and stretch them out a few frames. Now remember how we do that, I can just select out some place in the timeline. I will select frame 30. I will press F5 and we have added 30 frames to our first layer. I am just going to name this layer red ball and let us add another layer so we can have something else to animate. Let us add in a new layer and I will call this layer star and we will just go down grab our polygon star tool and we will draw a star that we can use for animation. I am just going to choose black as a fill color and we will go down to the poly star tool options. I just want to make sure that, that set to give us a star and a five point star should be good. We will click ‘okay’ and we can draw our star right here in the middle of that red circle.
Now, what I am going to do is set up a motion tween to just spin the star around. We have not tried this yet but this is a good trick to know as well. I am going to select the star, double click so I grab the fill and the stroke outline and let us remember our motion tween rules. I need to have one object per layer that is not a shape. So, I am just going to do what I did before and that is make a movie clip. Press F8, we will call our new movie clip star and I will set the registration point in the middle. And you can see, we created a movie clip which is stored inside of our movie clip now. But it works the same as if we were on the scene one timeline. Now, here is the spinning trick. I am going to set up a second keyframe at the end of the 30 frames, F6 but I am not going to change anything. We will go back to the first keyframe, set up our motion tween and right now, we have a really boring motion tween because our two keyframes are identical but I am going to the rotate options and instead of using auto rotate, I am going to change it to clockwise rotate and then I can choose how many times it should rotate. We will leave that at one and if I drag the play head around, you can see that I have a little spinning star there.
We can see how that animation works. So, let us go back out to scene one and see what we have got. Now, right off the back, you can see that our star is inside of that red dot head thing we had going and we had an animation setup on it that was going to wave it back it forth. So, if I drag the timeline around, we can see that animation playing just as it did before. What we are not seeing is the animation of the star. Now, we are going to need to use another tool to see that. Each timeline only plays what is in the timeline directly and that goes for the play button as well. If I rewind my movie using the control menu and I choose play either with the menu or the return key, you will see that it
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