Flash CS5: The Missing Manual

Shape Tweening (Morphing)

Shape tweening—sometimes referred to as morphing—lets you create an effect that makes one object appear as though it's slowly turning into another object. Often, shape tweening is one job that can't be done easily by simply changing properties with the motion tween, so Flash has a special tween tool for the job.

To make a shape tween, you draw the beginning object and the ending object, and Flash does all the rest. For example, say you create a keyframe containing a yellow ball. Then, 24 frames along the timeline, you create another keyframe containing a green star. You then apply a shape tween to the frame span, and Flash generates all the incremental frames necessary to show the ball slowly—frame by frame—transforming itself into a star when you run the animation.

Tip

Shape tweens work only on editable graphics. If you want to tween a symbol (Making It Move with Motion Tweens), then you need to use a motion tween. If you want to tween a group of objects or reshape characters of text, then you need to ungroup the objects (Selecting part of a shape or object), or break apart the text (Modify→Break Apart) and then apply the shape tweens to the individual elements.

Shape tweening lets you change more than just an object's shape over a series of frames. Using a shape tween, you can also change an object's size, color, transparency, position, scale, and rotation.

To create a shape tween:

1. Select the frame where you want your tween to begin (for example, Frame 1)