How to Create a Looping Background in Adobe Animate

coming into a new assignment here for computer animation we're going to be working on today is creating a looping background scene so utilizing things like motion tweens and the pen tool to draw these different layers and make them move at slightly different rates by using a little bit of trick by making them different sizes so what you'll see here is we have a few different layers we have a foreground middle-ground and then a background layer of kind of this atmospheric texture and so we'll go ahead and get started in starting a new project here and we want to make this in actionscript 3.0 and what we'll do is start by making our layers so what we'll want is layer 1 to be our foreground fo our II ground we'll make layer 2 our mid ground we can just call it mid and layer 3 to be our background okay and now actually I'm just realizing I have these in the wrong order if we want the foreground to be on top because that is going to be what is in the front and then the mid-ground and background to be in back is that those are going to be below ok so starting on this first keyframe here i'm going to use my pen tool and go ahead and make kind of a jagged kind of rocky Ashe line going across here and don't get too caught up in your spots where you put down your anchor points because you can always adjust those later on now have this black outline here I'm going to go ahead and choose a fill color as kind of like a tannish color actually what I was going to do is create a gradient to fill this so what I'm actually going to do is just select all of this by clicking on that keyframe and then just going to hold shift and click on the middle of this shape I want to take out this outline so I'm going to just depress the lead there and now I'm going to do is actually take this selection of my foreground kind of rocks and I'm going to change this fill to a linear but my color palette medium was actually pretty good gradient for this that I already had I'm kind of going from like a light light tannish color like yellow like tannish color to maybe a little bit more of kind of a little bit darker peach kind of tan color nice that is pretty good right there and once you have that kind of gradient filling what I'm going to do is use my gradient transform tool which is behind our free transform tool so if you click and hold and get a gradient transform tool and if I click on this gradient now what I want to do is actually rotate this so that the lighter color it's going from dark to light okay so there we go now that is pretty much set what I'm also going to do is just oops I was just going to kind of play with a little bit of the positioning of some of these some of those were a little bit too straight we want to kind of make some variety and the angles here we don't want it to be too uniform going all the way across but kind of mix up points and the levels here as they go across alright so that works pretty well what we want to do with this is once you have it done we want to convert it to a graphic so we'll press f8 on our keyboard and we'll call this rocks and say okay now what we'll want to do is actually double over this graphic so what we'll do is just go ahead and hold you could hold the option key on your keyboard click and drag on that graphic to actually copy another and then we'll just move it over here and try and make this line up with the other graphic now what we'll want to do is edit this so that they really line up at the beginning and end and if we edit one of our graphics it will go ahead and change the other one so if I double click on this first raw graphic here and I just want to change this point so that it matches up here with this one and I'm also going to pull this point down so that it ends up with this angle right here so if i zoom in a little bit just trying to get these the line up better actually what I could do is go back and pull this first point here pull that over a little bit and when we go back see how that closed that gap it's because it actually changed this graphic over here because they're both mirrors of the same thing so now I can take this corner maybe try and get it to line up good on that side and there we go so once those are line up and it looks like that will be kind of smooth going across there maybe a little bit space in there it's hard to tell when i zoom out it looks like there is but we'll see if we have to kind of adjust that later we can come back to it so now I'm going to go back out to my scene and so on our main scene again what we should have is these two kind of rock graphics going back and back to back together on our foreground layer so now we'll go with is we'll work on the middle ground area which is going to be more of kind of like a hilly shape again I'm going to take my pen tool and I'm going to just go ahead and draw us kind of a small hill that only goes about halfway across my stage so you know just going to make a couple points here and then I'm going to make this come all the way down to the bottom here kind of lining up with my other graphic and then closing that okay and so what this shape where I want to fill that with is more of a greenish tone and so I will take maybe this green right here and fill in that shape again I don't want to do the same trick what I'm going to do is actually turn off the visibility on this foreground layer so I can just see my Hill shape and work on this by itself I'll click on this first keyframe here hold shift and click to unselect the middle of this kind of shape and then press Delete again to delete that outline just looks a little bit cleaner without the outlines in this particular animation for the background so what I want to do now is again I'm going to convert this shape into a graphic okay before I do any kind of manipulating to this graphic I want to make sure that it's a it's been made into it converted to a graphic first so actually what I'll do now is um again before I do that I need to go ahead and copy this over so holding the option key and clicking and dragging that graphic over a little bit now what I can do is try and make these line up correctly I'm just going to scooch that a little bit okay so if I double click on this graphic here what I can see is that I need to move and move this corner a little bit see how that adjusted and now that is going a little bit straighter there what I might do also is move this bottom corner a little bit there and see how it's adjusting them both at the same time because they are just both copies of the same graphic so now I can do is take and adjust this point I'm just going to try and see if I can make these line up a little bit better that looks pretty good I think that those will line up right into each other the other thing now I can do is kind of Bend this line a little bit so that it looks a little more like a hill all right so there we go that looks pretty good maybe I'll just take in just this point just a little bit there awesome so I got a little bit of gap in there but I can adjust that back on my main scene so I'm just going to take this graphic and just nudge it once or twice with my keyboard just pressing the arrow key on my keyboard to kind of nudge it into place I think that maybe I will edit this just a little bit more just nudging it over there because when I look at this space here I had that little weird lip so I'm going to go ahead and double click on this graphic and adjust that just a little bit so that now it looks a little bit smoother there and then we're actually going to take and copy yet a third copy of this graphic and just stitch it on to the end there so now we've got three we should have if i zoom in a little bit here we'll turn this rock graphic back on what I should have is the two rad graphics and then the three middle ground graphics going along the inside there so now what I'll do is I'll turn off visibility on both of those I'm going to draw one final shape kind of to be in the background here again using the pen tool I'm going to just kind of make a square that just kind of cuts off the top area of the stage and I'm going to fill this color just kind of like a light bluish tint and again you use the same trick to kind of delete the outlines I could have selected the no stroke option on here also is another way to do it so if you just have that key frame selected and then just go to no stroke then we are all good okay so let's what I was also going to do to this shape is just kind of curve it a little bit kind of makes it look like there's a difference between the kind of like this top of the sky and then the middle kind of range of the sky too so next actually I am going to give the the stage itself a color maybe a darker blue here and now we just have a couple varieties in the tints and shades going on of the the sky there so now that we kind of have our drawing all done we have foreground with two graphics a middle ground with three graphics the background we can leave a raw graphic because we're not going to apply any tweens actually to that but now what we need to do is take both of these while they're selected I'm actually going to just scooch this one over a little bit because when I'm looking at it from back here I could see a little bit of space it's funny how that goes away when you zoom in but just to be sure so I just nudge those together I'm going to select both of these and press f8 again okay so now what I'm this is going to be is going to be the foreground I'm going to call that my foreground graphic and see how that now combined to those both together into one larger graphic I'm going to do the same thing with this middle ground Hills selecting all three by holding the shift key and I'm clicking on another one f8 I'm going to call this the mid graphic and actually I think I might want to take and adjust just the size of this a little bit I'm going to take my free transform tool back and actually what I think I may do to this now and I can edit this at any point really is the coloring of this it's a little bit stagnant I've actually want this to be a gradient just like I did with my foreground shape here so actually back to the scene going to go to this the hill graphic and when I double-click inside that you'll see there are the three graphics I really started with now if I go ahead inside of this I can actually edit this graphic which will change all three of these at once so what I can do is go ahead and go to fill and I can choose a linear gradient here and it's going to go by automatically taking the last gradient I did I'm instead going to change these colors to more greenish tones so I'll take kind of like a lighter green on one side and then on the other side I'll click here and make this into a darker green on this side okay so once you have a gradient going there we'll actually want to go back to our gradient transform tool and I'm going to just shift this around light greens on top dark green is on the bottom alright and see how it changed it to all of our graphics going along because each one of these is just a copy of this one right here so now which you'll see is see we're on the hill in the middle on the scene so now when we look at this there's just a little bit better dimension going between the hills and the the rocks and the background there so I actually think I'm going to just slightly edit this graphic as well again double clicking and now I'm going to make sure that this is in fact a linear gradient I think that I can make this light tone a little bit lighter is what I'm going to do to try and get a better effect of this gradient filling maybe make this side a little bit darker so what I may need to look at actually is which way this gradient is filling so I think maybe what I want is instead yeah there we go so the lighter color on the top darker color on the bottom I think that that just gives us a little bit better look there we go so now what we'll do is we are going to add some tweens so we have the whole background drawn okay so we have a foreground middle-ground background what we'll do is go out to 150 frames so I'm just scrolling sideways here going to 150 I'm going to hold shift click on the keyframes here and then press the f6 key to create new keyframes right along that ending point then what I can do is I'm going to take my foreground and I'm just going to nudge using my keyboard and holding the shift key and I'm just going to nudge this all the way over to that side again I'm going to take my middle key frame and just nudge this all the way over so that lines up there and now what we'll need to do is just add in a couple motion tweens so if I right click here create a motion tween if I right click in the middle here on the foreground layer create a motion tween um actually I think yep so it did seem like those added n let's see if they run when I test nope okay so I'm gonna have to actually undo those motion tweens really quick as motion tweens have changed right I was going to remove motion here not refine but remove motion so there was a couple of slight changes too and I'm going to also clear these keyframes to the way that motion tweens work in be anime CC so we're going to add these motion tweens actually before we do that keyframe in part so let's go ahead and just add motion tweens to both the foreground middle-ground layers and then I'll go ahead and add the f6 key frames at the very end of that line after that step okay so a little bit different way of doing things now I'm going to go ahead and move this over you can see the line being drawn so that tells me that the motion tweens being applied and this line right here is what I was referring to and I'll do the same thing actually just to make sure I'm clicking just on this keyframe with the middle ground layer there we go sub you can see the motion path kind of being drawn they are along that a little bit different in older versions of Adobe Flash there would be a line drawn in this motion tween but let's run this graphic and what we can see is that okay so I've got a couple little things I can maybe move my Hill graphics a little bit closer together there this is moving just fine it's moving the front at a little bit quicker pace than the middle ground creates more of an effect a realistic effect as that's what would be happening as far as the perspective goes but what I was going to say is I'm just going to go inside of this graphic really quickly I think what was happening is I want to move that layer just a smidge over so let's run this test again see how I moved that connection just a smidge and now that we can see now we can see that there's no line kind of flashing there I do see a slight jump in the back of this middle ground animation the foreground seems to smoothly keep running but what we want to do is make sure so last thing before we call the quits here is that on this middle ground layer that we have the same cutoff point right here at the edge that is happening when it starts okay so at the finish here what does it look like at the beginning that's the one thing so it's right about at the uptick of that hell so if we look at the end here okay we might be able to move this just a little bit further along okay so we play this back again let's see if we see the jump this time it might not be as much maybe a little smaller but that can take some playing with just a slight jump there still so we could tweak it just a little bit further maybe but again just one of those little things that you'll just need to just a little bit of trial and error before you figure out how you got it just right so again saw a little bit jump but I will keep playing with it I hope you have lots of look and create some good things here

Channel: Kyle Kipfer

Views: 64,707

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Id: o25YY6bc9dY

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 03 2016