At MAX, I heard a lot about Adobe User Groups, and met several people who ran their own groups in their home towns. I realized that Columbia did not have a User Group, and that we were missing a great opportunity for networking and great information about Adobe and its products. So I started one.

Visit the Adobe Groups site and sign up to be a member of the official Columbia Adobe User Group! We’ll have regular monthly metings, but just being a member will grant you access to our discussion boards, blog, resources, and other Adobe goodies in the near future. Help me create a group that will make us all better at what we do every day!

If you’ve worked with video animation programs like After Effects, the new Motion Editor panel in Flash will be a familiar and welcome addition. Animators now have an amazing amount of control over object motion which means that creating lifelike movement is faster and easier.  With Flash CS4, motion animation has grown up.

I am particularly excited by how easy it is to create a looping animation, which is a staple of Flash cartooning and interactive design. In previous versions, it was necessary to carefully create keyframes that matched beginning to end to create a seamless loop. Now, through the use of the new motion tween and a custom Easing curve, a seamless loop can be created in just a few seconds.

Begin with a symbol on the stage. Right click the symbol and select “Create Motion Tween.” Now all you need to do is set the two extremes of the movement in the timeline. In my example of a bouncing ball, the first frame is the ball at its peak height; the last frame is the ball on the floor. This will result in a “dropping” animation, not a bounce, but the looping effect will be handled using the motion editor by creating a custom easing curve.

In the Motion Editor, scroll down to the Eases section and click the plus button to add a “Custom” ease. This will allow you to adjust the curve to whatever shape you like. Adjust the handles and points by dragging, and add new points by CTRL-clicking the line. To create a loop, adjust the curve so that the line begins at 0%, rises to 100%, and drops back again to 0%. The smoother the curve, the more gradual the animation will appear.

Adjusting the custom easing curve.

To apply the custom easing  to the animation, scroll back up to the Basic motion section in the Motion Editor. Select the pulldown menu, and apply the “2-Custom” ease. You’ll see your custom curve superimposed over the original tween as a dotted line in the motion editor. Test the movie with CTRL-Enter to see the loop. In my example, you’ll notice I’ve created a second custom ease to control the transformation effect on the ball.

Select the 2-Custom ease from the pulldown menu.

Spend some time playing with both the built-in easing effects and the custom option to see just how powerful this new tool can be for quickly creating lifelike animations. Have fun!

Download the example file

It works like this: you add a symbol to the stage, right click, and choose “Create Motion Tween.” Then, scrub the timeline to the place where you’d like the symbol to move, and drag it to a new position on the stage. Flash automatically creates a keyframe, which is noted in the timeline by a small black diamond, and the animation is complete. You’ll also notice that a motion path appears on the screen connecting the two points, and here’s where things get interesting: you can edit the motion path using the selection tools to create any type of curved motion that you like. Dots along the path indicate where the symbol will be in each frame, and give you a sense of the speed of the animation.

Once a motion tween is added, the path can be adjusted to create a curve.

Once the animation is created, it can be modified by either dragging the endpoints of the motion path, by dragging the tweened frames in the timeline to automatically scale and adjust the tween to be longer or shorter, and by selecting the entire motion path and moving the entire animation as one unit. These abilities promise to save many hours adjusting and tweaking animations that in a keyframe-based timeline would have taken a great deal of time and patience.

The new system is not limited to position either: every attribute of an object can be tweened, such as its skew, color filters, alpha, and even its three-dimensional rotation and position (which I’ll look at a little later). All of these features allow you to create some fairly complex animations in a matter of minutes, leaving more time for experimentation and fine-tuning. I think this is an excellent new feature, but if you’re not convinced, you can still add motion tweens the old-fashioned way by selecting “Create Classic Tween” instead.

Next up: a look at some more new animation tools, including 3D position and rotation, and the new Motion Editor.

So now that my new toys are working, I’ll begin posting a short note about a new feature or two every few days. With a closer look, perhaps I can determine if CS4 really is a worthwhile upgrade. More later!

The theme of the conference, at least from my perspective, was of social networking tools and how they can be best used to promote not only your personal brand, but that of your company and projects. Having recently seen several attempts here at work to jump into this space, I’ve seen how easy it is to get lost in the social cloud and become just a part of the background noise. A social network can sense when a newcomer is insincere and trying to exploit the system for personal or monetary gain, so the secret is in not how many networks you can join, but how you deliver your message through each network’s own unwritten code of behavior. Success also depends on being consistent, and consciously crafting a persona that is engaging and genuinely interesting to your followers. I could ramble on and on about how my project is the best thing ever, but unless I can engage you in a dialogue that inspires you or at least gives you a chuckle every now and then, I’ll disappear from your radar as quickly as I appeared.

The conference came just as I’m finishing a refresh of my personal site, and I’ll be taking a little extra time to work in some of the lessons learned from other attendees and speakers. I’ve also got a list of blogs, products, and frameworks to check out over the next week.