5 Tips for Flash 8
5 tips for Flash 8 that you might not know…
(Some of these might work in other versions of Flash too…)
1. The PolyStar Tool
I’ve been using Flash 8 for a while now and up until recently I never knew the PolyStar tool existed (despite it actually being quite obvious!).
To enable it, left click and hold the Rectangle icon on the Tools panel. A menu will pop up, which lets you to select the PolyStar Tool. This allows you to draw perfect pentagons, hexagons, heptagons and octagons etc. Just click “Options…” on the Properties panel and enter the number of sides you’d like your polygon to have. Easy!
Under the same “Options…” menu, you can also change the Style to make perfect stars with a specified number of points.
2. Bitmap Fills
This is quite cunning. Draw a star on the stage (might aswell make use of tip 1!).
Import a bitmap image onto the stage (jpg, png, gif etc). Click on the image and break it apart (CTRL+B).
Click on the Fill Color icon. Using the Eyedropper, click onto the image you’ve just imported. Hey presto, you can now fill the star with the bitmap image!
Use the Gradient Transform Tool on the star to choose the exact part of the bitmap you want to use as the fill.
3. Quick No-Snap to Objects
I tend to work with Snap to Objects on as things just seem to get fiddly otherwise! There are however some occasions when you just don’t want a vector to snap. A quick solution to this is to hold down the “G” key, which will temporarily disable snapping - allowing precision positioning.
4. Quick Zooming
Another really obvious thing that I’d missed - you can use the Zoom tool to draw a bounding box around the exact area you want to zoom in on. Using the magnifying glass, just click and drag around the area you want to enlarge and bingo.
When you need to repeatedly zoom in and out on an object, holding the ALT key will make the magnifying glass do the opposite of whatever option is currently selected. No more faffing about selecting the “+” or “-” magnifying glass icons!
5. Quick Rounded Corners
Need to round the corners off a rectangle?
Draw the rectangle but keep holding the left mouse button down. Then just press the “Up” and “Down” arrow keys to round off the corners super quickly.
I hope some of those were useful! Let me know if you’ve got any more…
April 19th, 2008 at 8:46 am
Wow the quick rounded corners are really cool…
Thanks for the post it really saved me a lot of time..
Thanks again