Silhouette Animations

Obviously animating in silhouette is the general theme of this lesson, but the unique thing about this course is the broad range of techniques covered, many of which are so rarely used they haven't found their way into CartoonSmart's other Flash animation courses.

Here's an example, because we're working in silhouette we can "cheat" a little and leave out those fussy inside details of an object and just capture the movement of the exterior. Imagine turning a Rubix cube, NOT in silhouette: you've got tons of connecting perspective lines within the object and on every frame you'd have to adjust each line in perspective to make a smooth, realistic turn. But in silhouette, turning that same cube is relatively simple. This gives us z-axis-deficient Flash animators a way to fake a 3-dimensional turn of an object and the end effect is a smooth motion in silhouette with the illusion of depth. That sounds simple, but of course the inner workings in Flash might be a combination of twenty layers of tweened objects (like this)

The nail-biter is this: Suppose you are motion-tweening twenty-odd layers to make one seemingly singular movement, what if you don't want to use a flat color as the silhouette, but rather multiple JPGs to add texture to the scene. Ah-ha. Now that's not so easy. And thats one of the many things we tackle in the tutorial.

2 Hours of fun await ya... Click here for more details and examples