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Chapter 1: Understanding Flash3D
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Weight is the concept most forgotten in animation. Animation software doesn ’ t know how
much something weighs. Communicating weight to your audience requires that your animated
character shows strain when it picks up something heavy.
An execution of squash and stretch principle is illustrated in Figure 1.12. It shows a bouncing ball squash
and stretch as it hits the floor. As the ball approaches the floor, both shadow and ball stretch.
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Squash and stretch
Figure 1-12
The bouncing ball above was created completely in the Flash CS4 motion editor and involves several
motion edits. Here ’ s a really cool trick that enables you to apply this animation sequence to any object.
You now turn this timeline - based animation completely into ActionScript.
Turning Timeline Animation into ActionScript
One of the amazing additions to Flash 10 is the motion editor, which gives you powerful control over the
individual properties of your 3D animations. All animation can be done completely from the motion
editor and motions created can be saved as custom presets and added to any object. In addition, there
are tons of presets to choose from.
A full treatment of the motion editor is beyond the scope of this book. A good place to learn about the
motion editor is to view the CS4 video tutorial series by Todd Perkins on http://www.Lynda.com. Lynda.
com is a video tutorial service that specializes in Multimedia and Adobe products. They ’ re relatively
inexpensive and fairly up to date.
Converting Your Animation
You can convert 3D animation, created on the timeline or in the motion editor, into ActionScript. It ’ s
pretty simple. Just right click on the timeline animation tween and choose Copy Motion As ActionScipt
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