How to Use Vector Drawing Tools in Adobe Flash Lesson 2

Now in this lesson, we are going to be taking a closer look at all the vector drawing tools that we got available to us in the tool pallet. But first, we are going to need a new movie to draw into. Now, if your program starts up with the splash screen. You can use that screen to select a new file, otherwise, you can go right up to the file menu and choose new. We will get all the same selections in both places.

Now as you can see, Flash gives us three choices for flash files. It gives us one choice for mobile which is targeted towards a small screen environment, and then it gives us two choices based on action script 2 and 3.

Now action script 3 is the brand new action script that is available in this version of Flash. Now, we are not going to be focusing on action script in this series so I am just going to leave my selection at action script 2 and click OK. We got a brand new file with a default sized background, and there you can see our player 9. Action script 2 settings are all set up for us.

Now, if we want to take a look at the basics of vectors, we are going to look for one tool to start with and that is the pen tool. This is the standard vector drawing and a lot of vector drawing programs. Now with this version of Flash, we got new upgrades to the pen tool that makes it work a lot more like the rest of the Adobe software out there. Now, I mentioned that vectors are controlled by geometry and this pen tool creates that geometry directly for us. It has two very specific things that we are going to do with it. The first one is just clicking. Each time we click with this tool, we are going to be creating a control point. And if I click again, it is going to start connecting those control points together with a line.

So, let me just click around here. I am continuing on on our robot theme so I am going to make a little robot claw hand. I will just click through here. Now, if you want to end your file, you can go back to the beginning and it will close your line off with that little circle that we see there. And there, you can see all the control points that we have made clicking around with the pen tool. Now, as a companion to this tool, we are going to be taking a close look at the sub selection tool. That is the second selection tool in the menu and it is the one with the white fill. This tool is very specific. It allows you to go and select a control point and manipulate individual point. So you see there, I have selected one of the points and I can just click and drag it around and change the position of my line. Our shape is directly controlled by these points themselves so we can easily see where the geometry figure is in to our drawing.


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