KoolMoves questions from the King of the Newbies

Hey, everyone! Total newb to Flash and KoolMoves looks like it's the product for me. D/L'd the Demo version & have been playing with it for a few days (and read an awful lot here-thanks for the tips, everyone). Now I have a couple of questions, but first an explanation of the project:

Basic background scene. A line of penguins marches into the frame, stops, and then turns forward. They dance the Hokey-Pokey for 4 verses, salute and the scene dissolves into a logo that waves like a flag. Roll credits.

My penguins are built from a series of ovals and basically look like oddly shaped bowling pins. Any way to get KM to recognize the body as a single shape so I can just grab it and move the whole thing? Currently I have to move each individual oval from place to place. Major drag. I have a tremor in my hands, so I can't use the pencil tool to draw the basic shape with any accuracy and I'd like to play with the bones feature, putting a skeleton into the penguins to better control their movement. But even without bones, I'd really like to just grab the body as a single unit and move it across the frame, tilt it, rotate it, etc.

Is there any way to lock the rotate node in a shape so that when I come back to that shape in another frame the node is right where I left it the last time I used it? This would be really handy when animating a character.

Thanks for all help-
Patrick
King of the Newbies

put the penguin parts into their own movie clip you then just move the entire movieclip at once.

You can also put the each part into it's own movie clip within the penguin movie clip and position it so that the center of the movie clip is where you want to pivot from.

You can drag a selection box around a number of shapes and then move and/or rotate those shapes. While you have the shapes selected you can "group" the shapes using "group" in the Shapes drop down menu.

Wow. That's an interesting solution and one I hadn't even considered. Will KM support several instances of the same clip? Remember, I'm animating a line of penguins (7 of 'em, to be precise), or would each clip have to have the parts of all 7 in place? As you can imagine, 7 penguins will very shortly make onion-skinning a big black blur.

Does KM support anything like a parent-child relationship so that a rotation that I do to say, a flipper on the parent penguin would automatically change the flippers of the others? Man, would that ever cut animation time down (and as they're marching and dancing simultaneously, the synchronization wouldn't look too weird). Yeah, yeah, I know...RTFM, but the FM is big and in Adobe Reader and I'm way too cheap to print the darned thing, at least not until I actually buy the program and commit to it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by possum3

You can drag a selection box around a number of shapes and then move and/or rotate those shapes. While you have the shapes selected you can "group" the shapes using "group" in the Shapes drop down menu.

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Aha! Another solution! Thanks!

Make your penguin as a library item in the symbol library, Any changes to the library item. including animations will happen to ALL of the instances (copies) on the stage.

I see a tutorial coming hm......

Quote:

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Originally Posted by blanius

Make your penguin as a library item in the symbol library, Any changes to the library item. including animations will happen to ALL of the instances (copies) on the stage.

I see a tutorial coming hm......

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Oooh. I'll give that a try, too. Thanks to all y'all I managed to do a rudimentary 6 frame walk cycle that actually looked halfway decent (the charachter looked like he had a bum right leg, but what the heck, it was my first time).

I thought you couldn't animate symbols? :confused:

Symbol is not same as movieclip in symbol library. Make one penguin with animation. Right click on the penquin movie clip and select add to symbol library. Now press F11 and add as many as you want. Now group them and march them acrosss the screen as you see fit with normal tweening.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by blanius

Symbol is not same as movieclip in symbol library. Make one penguin with animation. Right click on the penquin movie clip and select add to symbol library. Now press F11 and add as many as you want. Now group them and march them acrosss the screen as you see fit with normal tweening.

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Now, that's very cool. I just have to animate one penguin! Thanks Blanius.