Ricedog

Flash Header

Friday, 12th August 2005

The header was simple to do though looking from the lag that is observed when viewing this site on a Mac Mini it looks like my code could be better but I’m not bothered enough to change it sadly. I’ve seen this flash-writing technique done horribly by a lot of people because they don’t script it. They would draw the finished image and use a masking layer on top and on each frame show more of the image eith the masking frame but this is slow, tedious and makes editing a pain. I’ve simply made Flash put a ink splodge in predetermined specific places. To use this method is simple if you know some simple actionscript namely: Arrays, for, duplicateMovieClip and something about editing arrays and the properties of movieclips. This method reads from a predertermined source so it can quickly tell where everything goes and so you have to give it a little thought on how you want this source to be recorded. I’ve used arrays because it’s simple to use and manipulate with flash. So we have our data to say where ink splodge should be placed what we need to know now is how the ink splodges are to be laid down. As you should’ve guessed with the duplicateMovieClip. The splodge is just a movie clip itself and remember to use the duplicateMovieClip function you need to use have a first initial movie clip to duplicate from. We use the for function to simply do the repeatitive task of duplicating the movie clip, read the array and position the movie clip. Wait a minute this sounds terrible because now we to write a massive passage for our array. Wait again! We can dodge that bullet by making a drawing editor that records where to put the movieclips as an array that we can copy to put into our original flash. I’ll leave you guys to figure that out, it shouldn’t be so hard.

If you need to know about the actionscript language used in this post refer to Kirupa and to TonyPa

Posted to Progress