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Custom Text Effect |
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Written by Rawpulse
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Friday, 03 February 2006 |
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In this text effect, we look at new ways to introduce the text to the stage.
There are lots of different text effects possible in Flash. We're going to look at a nice simple effect, where the letters fall into place. If you want to see an example of the effect, click here.
So, let's get started. Open a new document, 300x200 in size. Set the frame rate to 25 FPS. On the first layer, type your text on the stage. Select your text with the Selection Tool. You need to break it apart so you can animate each individual letter. The shorter the text, the easier it will be. So to break it apart press Control + B or go to Modify > Break Apart. You will notice that all the letters are now seperated.
The next thing you need to do is put each letter on a new layer. Instead of doing this one by one, just select all the letters, right click, and select Distribute To Layers. Now go to frame 40, and add a keyframe to every layer. It's easier doing this by selecting all the layers at frame 40, and adding a keyframe by pressing F6. Add a motion tween on every layer between frames 1 and 40. To add a motion tween, right click the frame and select Create Motion Tween. At this point your timeline should look a little something like this:
Now, if you play your animation, nothing will happen. But we have everything set up so we can begin animating. Go back to frame 1 on the layer of your first letter. Since I am using the text "KnowFlash.com" this would be "K". Use the selection tool to move the first letter off the stage to the left. Now if you play the animation, the first letter will gradually move into place. Do the same with the second letter on the next layer, except position it off the stage further down. Eventually you should have positioned the letters all the way around the stage, like so:
Now if you play the animation by pressing Control + Enter, you will see that the letters all move into place in a neat looking way. The final animation should look like this. While you could leave it at this stage, you could also experiment with some other animations. See examples below:
Effect 1
Effect 2
Effect 3
If you have had any trouble with this tutorial, feel free to post on the KnowFlash forum.
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Tutorials 
