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Through several hands-on tutorials, instructor Todd Perkins shows how to best build dynamic, streamlined sites using Flash CS3 Professional. Learn how to create custom keyboard shortcuts, apply advanced text techniques such as animating scrolling text with custom easing controls, and using advanced animation techniques. Flash CS3 Professional Beyond the Basics covers many challenging features, including adding complex interactivity to a Flash CS3 project and getting Flash content on a phone. Exercise files accompany the tutorials.
In this chapter we're going to talk about some advanced animation techniques. We'll start by talking about how to take an object with many movie clips and how to separate those movie clips into individual layers. If you're following along, I'm working in 01_Distribute_Layers.fla in the Chapter 05 folder in the Exercise Files folder. In the timeline there's one layer called robot and on that layer there's an instance of a movie clip called mcRobot. I'm going to double click the instance on the stage to enter its timeline. Inside of the mcRobot's timeline you can select each element of the robot and find that each one of those elements is a separate movie clip.
Now what we want is to put all of these movie clips on individual named layers. Now if we're going to cut and paste the movie clips that could be a very tedious process. In Flash, you can actually select a bunch of objects and put those objects in separate layers using one quick technique called Distribute to Layers. Let's talk about how that works. Select all of the robot on the stage and then right-click or Ctrl+click one of the movie clips that make up the robot, and choose Distribute to Layers. When you check that option, Flash creates layers with the movie clip names of each movie clip in your selection, and places each one of those movie clips on a separate layer.
And that is a great tool and you can see it's a lot more convenient than cutting and pasting a bunch of objects and creating and naming the layers yourself. What I'm going to do is select layer 1 at the very top and I'm going to delete that layer by clicking that Delete Layer button at the bottom of the timeline. Now we have all our movie clips on separate named layers. And there's a look at how to take an object made up of a bunch of different objects and distribute those objects to different named layers.
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