This tutorial shows you how to make simple animations ('movies') with 3D Flash Animator, version 3.5 (the current version in March 2002). The program can be downloaded from www.insanetools.com and is FREE. You can use the free version to make animations that can be inserted into web pages but if you want to include interactive buttons in your web page animations you will need to pay $49.95 to register your copy, or will need to find someone that already has a registered copy, such as me! The download is about 5MB and expands to about 18MB when you install the program.

Before you try to make a movie of your own it would be a good idea to get a feel for what the movies can do by looking at some of the sample movies - each time you load a movie you can click the play button and in most cases the movie will animate. Some sample movies include sound but you will hear no sound in the CIV computer labs unless you request headphones from me. Once you've tested each movie, stop it with the stop button and close it before opening the next one.

When you are ready to make a movie of your own do File>New Project>Movie and 3D Flash Animator will ask you what size movie you want to create - I suggest a movie size of 480 x 360 pixels would be a good choice for most of your movies since it leaves plenty of room on your screen for the various palettes you will work with. However, I suggest you choose a movie size of 320 x 240 pixels for your first movie since that is the size that I used to make this tutorial, to keep the pictures small.

Looking at the window above, you can see the movie starts as a blank rectangle, usually white, and a Flash Movie properties window appears to the right of the window. It would be a good idea to type a more meaningful name for your movie already. The default duration of the movie is 10 seconds, and the movie will normally repeat (loop) when it reaches the end (you can change this behavior, as you can see in the window above). A frame rate of 16 frames per second will make the animation appear quite smooth, though not quite as smooth as a TV picture for example, which shows you 25 frames per second. If you make the frame rate too high, the computer may have difficulty fulfilling your request.

To create your movie, the basic steps are:

When you click the 'Add an element' button you will see that the available element types include title text, 3D text, buttons, bitmap images, sounds and many more. For our first movie, add a title text object to the movie by selecting it from the list (don't choose 3D Title as this is too difficult, see note below).  You'll see a New Title window appear, like this:

I've typed "My first movie" as the text, and I've changed the fill color to blue. I haven't turned on the outline of the letters as the more complicated I make the movie the more risk there is that it may become jerky if the computer is not able to generate the frames fast enough. I didn't change the title of the new text, but it would be a good idea to do so.

When you click the 'Create Title' button, a line like this appears in the element section of the movie properties window and the new title element is added to your movie, which will now look something like this:

The small squares or 'handles' in the corners indicate that the element is selected and dragging them should cause the element to move around - try it... This is because the 'move selected object' button is selected at the left of your screen - try switching to the 'rotate around center' mode and you will see how dragging a handle now causes the element to rotate. To change the size of the object use the 'scale' button - try it now. You can also choose the 'move point' button and pull the corner handles to scale the object, but this button is really designed for other uses. You can use it, for example, to move the center point in the object which defines the 'centre of rotation' (try moving the centre of rotation and then rotating the object again).

While we're looking at the buttons at the left of the screen, it's worth noting that there is an undo button near the bottom.

Let's try adding an 'event' to the movie, to animate our title. Make sure the title object is still selected then click the 'Add an event' button in the movie properties window and you will given many options including show, hide, place, move, explode, wave and morph. Choose the Show event as that it is a simple one to start with. A Show window will open - look though the options and notice that the default duration for this event is 1 second. Don't change anything just now -  simply close the Show window instead. You can try running your movie now by clicking the play button - you should see your title appear in accordance with the settings on the Show event. If you wait long enough you will notice that the movie loops (repeats) every 10 seconds.

To make the movie more interesting, let's change the Show event so that the title slides in from the side. When you added the Show event to the movie, a line was added to the Events section of the movie properties window:

Double-click the name of the event ("Show...") and the settings window for the event will re-open. Turn on the effects 'slide in from right' and 'spin from -360 degrees' and run your movie again. Experiment with the settings to find out what each one does (some of the 'presets' are very nice...)

Let's add an explode event to the movie, to make the title explode. Choose Add an event > Explode selected elements > Add Event then close the window without changing the settings. You should see the explosion happen now when you run the movie (note that you will not see the explosion effect if the movie was running all the time you set up the effect - you'll have to stop the movie and start it again to see the effect).

The problem now is that the explode event happens at the same time as the show event, so your animation probably looks pretty messy. We'd like the explode event to happen only after the show event has finished (it takes 1 second, remember, unless you changed it). Look in the events section of the movie properties window and you will notice that both the Show event and the Explode event have a 'delay' of zero. The delay of the first event is the delay in seconds between the start of the movie and the beginning of the event. The delay of any event lower down the list is the delay measured from the beginning of the previous event. Right now the explode event has a delay of zero so it begins at the same time that the Show event begins - hence the mess. Change the delay of the Explode event to 3 seconds so that the Show event can complete (in 1 second) followed by 2 seconds of static title before the explosion takes place. Run the movie...

The events list is very important in 3D Flash Animator for it determines not only the sequence of events but also their timing. The events list replaces the 'timeline' used by other programs such as Macromedia Flash (3D Flash Animator has timelines too, but they don't do much). To change the order of the events, just drag the name of an event into a new position in the list. To delete an event, click once on its name to select it then press the Delete key on the keyboard, or right-click the name and select Delete.

Try adding some of the other easy events to your movie, such as hide, place, ping and wave, but don't try using the other more difficult events until I introduce them first.

When you are ready to save your (unfinished) movie, choose File>Save As and save in the right folder with a meaningful name. The file will be saved in a format called 'movie' which can not be added to web pages so we will later need to learn how to convert the movie into the SWF format that can be added to web pages. Close the movie by closing either the movie window or the movie settings window on the right.

Warning: Make sure that when you save a movie for the first time you choose Save As and not Save. In most programs Save As works like Save when you save for the first time but Flash Animator is different - choosing Save saves the movie immediately to the wrong folder (not your personal folder) so TAKE CARE.

A note about timelines

In the above exercise, you set delays (in seconds) to determine when events should take place. An alternate way of programming events which we will not use in this tutorial (but which is common in other programs such as Macromedia Flash) is to use a 'timeline'. If you would like to use a timeline to schedule events in your movie, rather than setting the duration in seconds for each one, then choose File>New Project>Timeline when creating the movie, rather than File>New Project>Movie. Check the Help system for more help with timelines.

3D Titles and Models

3D titles and models are are powerful new features of 3D Flash Animator. This are advanced topics, however, and are not covered by this tutorial. If you are very keen to learn about 3D effects then use the program's Help system to find out more...