Animate offers a variety of options for creating animation and special effects. Each method gives you distinct options for making interesting animated material.
The following animations are supported by Animate:
Motion Tweens
Use motion tweens to set properties for an object in one frame and then in another, such as location and alpha transparency. The property values of the frames in between are then interpolated by Animate. Motion tweens are useful for animation that involves continuous object movement or modification. Motion tweens display as a contiguous span of frames in the Timeline, which can be selected as a single item by default. Motion tweens are both powerful and easy to make.
Classic Tweens
Classic tweens are similar to motion tweens, however they are more difficult to make. Classic tweens provide for some unique animated effects that span-based tweens cannot.
Inverse Kinematics poses (deprecated with Animate)
Inverse kinematic poses allow you to stretch and bend shape objects, as well as link groups of symbol instances in lifelike ways. You can adjust the location of bones or symbols in separate keyframes after you’ve added them to a shape or a group of symbols. The places in the in-between frames are interpolated by Animate.
Shape Tweens
Shape tweening is when you draw a shape at one frame in the Timeline and then alter it or draw another shape at a different frame. The animation of one shape morphing into another is then created by interpolating the intermediate shapes for the frames in between.
Frame-by-frame animation
You can define distinct art for each frame in the Timeline using this animation technique. This approach can be used to generate the effect of a film’s frames being played in fast succession. This technique is effective in complex animations when each frame’s graphic elements must be unique.
About Frame Rates
The frame rate, or the speed at which the animation is displayed, is expressed in frames per second (fps). A slow frame rate causes the animation to appear to stop and start, whereas a fast frame rate blurs the animation’s features. The default frame rate for new Animate documents is 24 frames per second, which produces the best results on the web. The standard frame rate for motion pictures is 24 frames per second.
The smoothness of the playback is affected by the complexity of the animation and the speed of the machine performing it. Test your animations on a number of computers to determine the best frame rates.
Because you can only select one frame rate for the whole Animate document, do so before you start animating.
