School of Flash

Flash CS4 Tutorial - 3D Planet Rings

Craig — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:46:50 +0000

In today’s tutorial, you’ll learn how to use Flash CS4’s new 3D Rotation tool in order to transform the stroke of a circle into easy-to-edit planet rings.

My Beautiful Baby Girl

Craig — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 04:24:34 +0000

I usually restrain myself from personal posts on School of Flash, but this time, I couldn’t help myself. I took this picture earlier today, and it was too precious not to share!

Flash Video Tutorial - 3D in Flash CS4

Craig — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 06:17:42 +0000

In this tutorial, you’ll learn all about the new 3D features included with Flash CS4. The latest release of Flash supports the ability to rotate and move flat objects (movie clips) around in 3D space. In the tutorial, you’ll also learn how to animate the 3D rotation of an object using ActionScript’s new rotationX, rotationY, and rotationZ properties.

Click here for more of my FREE Flash video tutorials

Flash CS3 Video Tutorial - Basic Slideshow

Craig — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:36:20 +0000

Today’s tutorial is an excerpt from the LearnFlash video series, “Creating Slideshows in Flash CS3.” This excerpt is a beginner-level tutorial on how to throw together a timeline-dependent slideshow with a “previous” and a “next” button. The rest of the video series go into more depth on how to create more complex slideshows using Flash CS3 and ActionScript 3.

Click below to view the video. And then click here for more of my FREE Flash video tutorials.

Click here for more of my FREE Flash video tutorials

Flash 8 Tutorial - Creating a Standalone Flash Button

Craig — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:47:12 +0000

Today’s tutorial is an excerpt from the LearnFlash video series, “Adding Flash Elements to Your Website.” This video series demonstrates different types of Flash elements you can insert into your HTML website. In this video excerpt, which was creating with Flash 8 and ActionScript 2, you’ll learn how to create a standalone Flash button for your HTML website. In order to add code to the button to get it to function, you would simply create an invisible button (a button symbol with information ONLY in the “Hit” state) that hovers over the entire Flash button and add the appropriate code to it.

Click below to view the video. And then click here for more of my FREE Flash video tutorials.

Click here for more of my FREE Flash video tutorials

Flash Tutorial - Tracing a Sketch

Craig — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:21:16 +0000

Today’s video tutorial is an excerpt from “Creative Drawing Techniques in Flash” on LearnFlash. In this video, you’ll learn how to use Flash’s drawing tools to trace over an image in order to make a semi-photorealistic vector drawing. This tutorial is compatible with all versions of Flash.

Click below to view the video. And then click here for more of my FREE Flash video tutorials.

Click here for more of my FREE Flash video tutorials

Flash Tutorial - Building a Simple Website

Craig — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 18:06:33 +0000

Today’s video tutorial is an excerpt from the “Building Websites in Flash CS3″ video training series that I authored for LearnFlash. In this video, we talk about how to add CLICK events to the buttons of a simple website that will provide navigation to the site’s different pages. The rest of the video series demonstrates in detail how to create more complex Flash websites using Flash CS3 and ActionScript 3.

Click below to view the video. And then click here for more of my FREE Flash video tutorials.

Click here for more of my FREE Flash video tutorials

ActionScript Tutorial - Animating with a Timer

Craig — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:11:41 +0000

Animating objects using ActionScript instead of the timeline allows for a great deal of flexibility. It allows you to create dynamic animations that respond to user interaction. Learning how to animate using ActionScript is an important stepping stone towards being able to create interactive menus, Flash games, and much more.

Today’s video tutorial is a clip from a video series I created for LearnFlash called “ActionScript 3 Animation”. In this particular video, you’ll learn how to animate the movement of an object using the Timer class in ActionScript.

Click below to view the video. And then click here for more of my FREE Flash video tutorials.

Click here for more of my FREE Flash video tutorials

Flash CS3 Tutorial - ActionScript Physics - Gravity

Craig — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:34:28 +0000

As many of you know, I do a lot of video training for LearnFlash.com, and in order to bring my loyal readers some more consistent content, I’ve decided to start showcasing some of the video tutorials that I’ve done for LearnFlash. Today’s post is an excerpt from the “Flash Particle Effects” video series, and it discusses how to add gravity to your particle effects using ActionScript 3.0. Simply stated, this is accomplished by constantly increasing the y velocity of a particle, but the video explains it in much better detail.

Click below to view the video. And then click here for more of my FREE Flash video tutorials.

Click here for more of my FREE Flash video tutorials

Adobe Unveils CS4

Craig — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:06:52 +0000

This morning, I joined hundreds of thousands of people around the world for an online streaming presentation of Adobe Creative Suite 4. My overall impression . . . Well, I guess I’m hard to impress.

Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of exciting new features that are going to make Flash, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and the rest of the Creative Suite a lot more efficient and a lot more fun. But I was a little underwhelmed with the presentation. They talked a lot about the integration between various products (which is handy), but in a presentation like this, I’d like to see a lot more about the bells and whistles of individual products.

Some of the bells and whistles they did cover included Flash CS4’s inclusion of inverse kinematics, 3D effects, and a new animation engine. For Photoshop, they covered some smart resizing features and new 3D features. But all-in-all, I would have liked to have seen more, especially since he started off the presentation by saying that Creative Suite 4 was going to be no minor upgrade.

The most disappointing part of the presentation was that they never announced a release date for CS4. In fact, I had to stumble upon the right link just to figure out how to get notified about the release of the products. (Click here to be notified by email.) But I do really like the packaging of the new products!