UNI [SITE + MOTION] – ANIMATION v6 IMAGE 4

March 28th, 2009 | Richard Almond

This is the 4th image of the main 5 in the animation. The idea was to experiment with the drag state in Flash and I wanted to allow the snow on the roof-lights to be slid up and down with the cursor like blinds. I thought this would be fairly easy, but it seems I was wrong, and it took me all bloody day to discover that unless ActionScript and Algebra are your first and second languages, its almost impossible.

The difficulty seems to be in restricting a draggable object to a path. It’s fairly straightforward to limit the object to a bounding rectangle, and therefore easy to limit to a horizontal or vertical line (by setting the rectangle width or height to zero), but incredibly difficult to limit to a diagonal line. I expected that I could add a motion guide as a drag path in a similar way to a tween, but this method also proved unsuccessful.

I ended up settling for a slightly different method, where the snow on the roof-lights are animated buttons which are triggered on the down state.

Click here to see it at full size

There is also a reset button somewhere in the animation, to return the snow to its original position.