Help with simple animation

[autumn_whispers2me]

I want to create a simple animation of a dragonfly 'flying' from the page---off the page. For some reason I can't seem to make it work, and here's the problem....

I can make the wings move while the dragonfly is in place, and I can move the dragonfly in a straight line from point A to point B... but I can't do both.

I'd like to have the dragonfly's flight path vary a little, but I can't get it to work for some crazy reason. So how do I have both worlds where the dragonfly moves across the movie and off---with wings moving too?

What is it I'm not considering here that's stopping this progress??

[Webforumz Staff]

Make the dragonfly into a movieclip. Inside the movieclip animate the wings. Outside, animate the dragonfly itself?

[autumn_whispers2me]

I'm not sure how to animate the wings inside Flash, though. There are two images: one image with the wings 'up,' the other with the wings 'down.' I did that because I couldn't figure out how to make them do that inside Flash itself.

So what I'm saying is that there is the base image, the dragonfly image with wings in the neutral position, and one of the dragonfly with wings in up position. Do the two dfly images go on the same layer, or diff layers?

[benbacardi]

if you want to animate the dragonfly and you only have two images, create a movie clip with one layer in it, add the first dragon image to the first frame and the second dragonfly image to the second frame (or 3rd, 4th, depending on how fast you want the wings to flap).

then just create another movie clip with the dragonfly movieclip inside it, moving....

[autumn_whispers2me]

okay... I *think* I understand. lol I'll give it a shot. Thanks!

[master_phat]

k um i guess i was kinda bored cuz i dont go to sleep that much and here you go. your own .fla of a dragonfly. obviously its not gunna be exactly what you want but looking through there will help you understand the concept of nested movie clips. Dont really need to explain much cuz i labeled a lot of crap in there of what you need to know. Any questions just post back. Also what would be easy is to replace the wings and body with your own by double clicking on the graphic symbols and replace it with your own wings and body there, have fun :P


www.eggrollindustries.com/dragonfly.fla

www.eggrollindustries.com/dragonfly.swf

[Webforumz Staff]

Woah, well done master_phat!

Finally someone else willing to go that extra mile to help!

[master_phat]

Glad to help! its awesome when people do that for me so thought i could be of some help. anyways i just hope he comes back to his topic and finds it lol :wink: