Unit 15. Effects on Animations (II)

Effects on the Tweened Symbol

      We saw in last units how apply effects on symbols and we saw that it was possible to obtain showy effects. However, the effects show their true power when the symbol take pasrt in an animation.

In order to explain and to demonstrate the possibilities of these effects we are going to open the Properties Panel, that will show us, in the tab "Color" the possible effects to apply if we select an instance of any symbol of our movie.

           We can apply the effects on any symbol of any frame of the animation to both the initial or final frame and in the intervals. In this last case, we must turn the keyframe that one that contains the instance and later apply the effect.

     In order to understand well what follows, it is necessary to control the application of effects on instances. We saw this in Unit 9 and for that reason we will omit details on how apply concrete effects for symbols.

Brightness Effect

The brightness effect, as its own name indicates, is very convenient to simulate the effect that some object switches on or shines, or on the contrary switches off or disappears.

     In the example at the left, we have tried to simulate this effect. For it we have created a traffic light with blinkers.

     As we can see, the lights switch on and off alternating. In order to obtain this we've created a tween for each light formed by three keyframes. We’ve placed the third frame just in the middle of the frame sequence. We’ve given the same brightness value to both the first light and the last one, and we've given a higher or lower value to the middle frame according to whether the symbol is from the top or bottom.

     As the light motions are diverse and independent we've placed them in different layers.

     For the top light the brightness values were: 0 for the first keyframe, -46 for the central one and 0 for the middle frame.

     And for the inferior light, on the contrary, we set: 0 for the first keyframe, -46 for the central one, and 0 for the middle frame.

Tint Effect

The Tint effect has many applications. It’s used very often in texts and buttons, for example, to make gradual color change when the mouse touches them or simply effects of color change in presentations.

    The tints make much more vivid and showy the presentations and if several effects are used, and well combined, it gives the animation a fast rhythm, like a color explosion that surprises the viewer of the movie.

    Another interesting use of the tint effect is to simulate the projection of a color light on an object that approaches to it. Let's see an example of this.

    We see the approaching of the airplane to the red light of the Sun, and this illuminates it with a red light.

    We've applied to the airplane instance in the last frame of its motion tween a red tint effect with an intensity of 60%. We've done the same in the center of the Sun but with two phases, putting in the central frame a tint effect of 25%.

    The solar crown is simply a shape tweening in four phases.

Transparency Effect (Alpha)

This it is probably the most used effect due to the fact of controlling the degree of the object transparency. We can, for example, simulate a centered focus at a stage or, more usual, make appear objects from nowhere and also cause their gradual vanishing.

     This example could represent the entrance to any Web or Internet portal, in fact it is quite typical. In order to see how to make an animation as the previous one press here.

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