How to Use the Onion Skin in Flash Professional 8
Flash 8 is great at creating animations, especially frame-by-frame animations. You create frame-by-frame animations one frame at a time, creating an object in one frame, and then altering the object slightly in the next frame, and so on until you finish the animation. It's difficult to create these types of animations when you can't see the preceding frames. Onion Skins allow you to see previews of the previous frames, acting as a visual guides to help you draw the current frame.
Other People Are Reading
Instructions
-
Using Onion Skins to Create Animation
-
1
Start a new Flash 8 movie or open an existing movie in which you want to create a frame-by-frame animation.
-
2
Create a new layer in the Timeline panel for your animation like this: Click the "Insert Layer" button, the first button in the lower-left corner of the panel.
-
-
3
Right-click the first frame in the new layer where you want your animation to begin, and then choose "Insert Keyframe" from the pop-up menu.
-
4
Draw the object you want to animate on the Stage. This is the first phase, or frame, of the animation.
-
5
Go to the Timeline panel and click the "Onion Skin" button. This is the second button directly below the frames in the panel.
-
6
Right-click the next frame in your animation layer (the frame directly to the right of the frame where you started the animation) and choose "Insert Blank Keyframe."
-
7
Flash displays a grayed out version of the first frame on the Stage. This is what Onion Skin does---shows you previews of the previous frames to help you draw the current frame.
-
8
Draw the next phase of your animation.
-
9
Repeat the process of inserting blank keyframes and drawing the next phases of your animation until you have completed it.
-
1
Tips & Warnings
You can see outline versions of your animation steps by clicking the "Onion Skin Outlines" button to the right of the Onion Skin button.
You can edit multiple frames of your Onion Skin animation by clicking the "Edit Multiple Frames" button, the second button from the right of the Onion Skin button.
You can control the number of visible previews with "Modify Onion Markers" button, the third button from the right of the Onion Skin button.
You can toggle Onion Skin on and off by clicking the "Onion Skin" button.
Onion Skins work the same in nearly all versions of Flash.
References
- Photo Credit Movie dancers image by Vojsek from Fotolia.com
