Legacy
04-14-2001, 06:41 AM
Just wondering...does anybody know a quick and easy way to make animated flowcharts using Flash? For example, say you had a rectangular symbol, and you wanted an arrow to grow out of that symbol to point to another rectangular symbol. Right now what I'm doing is to create a symbol that consists of an expanding line symbol together with a black triangle (the arrow head).
This approach looks fine, but has several drawbacks:
- if I need to resize the arrow, it's a big problem; if I make the arrow longer, the head gets elongated, and if I make it shorter, it gets fat. It gets even worse if I want to have multiple "arrow trees" that allow one symbol to point to two other symbols.
- I can't see where the arrow is going to end up. With the expanding arrow embedded in a movie clip symbol, I can't see where the arrow is going to end up until I export the movie. I've used an invisible button in the clip to see the extents of the movie, but with arrow trees, it's still tough to line up all the symbols. Gets really tedious after a while.
So if someone could tell me how to do this easily, or tell me about another program that would allow me to make these animations in another program and then import them into Flash, that'd be great. For example, does Director have features that would make this easier?
Ken
This approach looks fine, but has several drawbacks:
- if I need to resize the arrow, it's a big problem; if I make the arrow longer, the head gets elongated, and if I make it shorter, it gets fat. It gets even worse if I want to have multiple "arrow trees" that allow one symbol to point to two other symbols.
- I can't see where the arrow is going to end up. With the expanding arrow embedded in a movie clip symbol, I can't see where the arrow is going to end up until I export the movie. I've used an invisible button in the clip to see the extents of the movie, but with arrow trees, it's still tough to line up all the symbols. Gets really tedious after a while.
So if someone could tell me how to do this easily, or tell me about another program that would allow me to make these animations in another program and then import them into Flash, that'd be great. For example, does Director have features that would make this easier?
Ken