Fun with Flash
Ah, the joy of learning a new computer program. I am not sure what is more fun, knowing that the software package should be able to do something but not knowing where to find this function and/or keystrokes or wasting several hours trying to get the software package to do something that is does not seemed to be programmed to do.
Today was a day for both of these scenarios. It makes me think of the best definition of computer programming that I ever heard. The IEEE magazine definition for computer programming is “…a pastime akin to repeatedly banging your head against a wall, but not as enjoyable.”
I spent several hours trying to figure out how to mask areas of an movie in Flash. I spent a good deal of time to program quasi-masks using graphics that are the same color as the background to cover the movie. Over time, the quasi-masks shrink and fade out. It turns out what I did manually can be done automatically with built-in timeline transitions functions. I am not bummed out at finding this function after I came up with my own fix because I prefer my transitions. But it would have been nice to know that they were there.
The real frustration was in my attempt to create real masks that faded away over time. There may be ways to do this using just the timeline and using just Actionscript methods. But I was not able to get the timeline methods to work. According to the book, Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity, the key may be converting the masks to bitmaps using the Actionscript code:
mask_movieclip.cacheAsBitmap = true;
Still working on this. More fun ahead. Hold on tight!
Technorati tags: Flash, Flash masks, programming, learning new software, fades
Tags: fades, Flash, Flash masks, learning new software, programming