Box Being Drawn

[Michele75]

I have a "how to" question that is probably something basic, but I can't figure it out. How do you do an animation in Flash that looks like a box is drawing itself?

I tried making a box without a fill and with a hairline stroke. Then I made a mask for it . I tried to do key frames with the mask so it would uncover the box in a way that would make the final animation look like the box was being drawn.

The attached Flash file is an example of how I tried to animate the mask layer. For some reason it whacks out at the last frame.

Could you please tell me why it whacks out and if there's a better way to achieve the effect I'm going for.

[Dylan Marvin]

Interesting. The fla you sent has the box being drawn by shape tweens, not masking. Do you mean you want to duplicate that effect with masks? If you're sticking with shape tweens, you might want to find a quick tutorial on shape hints. Also, layers are key in animation. All you would need is to create one "side" of the animation in a movieclip, put a "stop()" in its last frame, copy/paste it a few times, rotate them accordingly and offset their positions on the timeline. If what I said sounds like garbage let me know and I'll whip something up as an example.

[Dylan Marvin]

This is just a quick idea of how you can manipulate layers. These effects can all be done with masking, actionscript, or shape tweening (the last used for time's sake and ease of "seeing" what's going on). I used graphics in this case, with "play once" checked. For simple purposes it's the same as using a movieClip with a stop() in the last frame (I know, I know... big differences between the two in most cases). Also is an example of taking those layers off the timeline and into another graphic, which then can be manipulated.

[Michele75]

Thank you very much Dylan!