looking for suggestions for my presentation on tweening

[mgason]

Hi,

I am giving a presentation on tweening with TweenMax and TimelineMax at the January meeting of the Flash user group in Minneapolis.

This will be for about an hour.

The audience has wildly varying levels of Actionscript skill.

 

I intend to cover the basics, move an object around, sequence some tweens etc.

I will show them around the handy interactive demo's on the site.

I have also been looking through the forum posts for interesting code, certainly learned a few things doing that

So I have the basics covered.

 

I am writing to ask if anyone has any ideas for beyond the basics.

Are there any cool things that people regularly miss?

For instance everyone immediately thinks tween a movieclip around on stage, but you can tween anything.

Any ideas on things that may not immediately leap to mind for tweening, any unusual or really cool uses for these tweening goodies?

I don't necessarily need code (although if you have some already that you want to share I won't say no)

Just suggestions of things to mention to mention towards the end, just to say "OK you now can tween a position, tween a color etc, but did you think you could also tween a ????"

 

So everyone I hope you have some time to share your thoughts.

I am speaking on January 20th.

 

thanks Mark

[GreenSock]

That’s great, Mark. So glad to hear about the presentation you’ll be doing. As for ideas, hmmm…that's a pretty broad question Here are a few things off the top of my head:

 

1) Build a simple class that has a getter/setter for a numeric property that you tween to create custom effects. For example, an Orbiter class that has the following getters/setters: centerX, centerY, radius, size, and angle. Maybe it extends Sprite and draws a simple circle on the stage. Then you could have it plot the position of the circle based on the various properties. Then you could simply do TweenLite.to(myObject, 3, {angle:180, radius:200}) to have it spin to a new position in orbit. The plotting logic would be handled inside your custom getters/setters. This demonstrates the idea that TweenLite/Max can tween ANY numeric property of ANY object.

 

2) Build a sequence with TimelineLite and then tween the currentTime with an ease to get the effect of easing across the entire sequence. This is demonstrated at http://pv3d.org/2009/12/18/tweenmax-twe ... -tweening/

 

3) Build some classes with common animateIn() and animateOut() methods that return TimelineLite instances. Then use those to build a whole sequence (maybe a slideshow or something) by nesting them inside a parent timeline, like:

parentTimeline.append( myClass1.animateIn() );
parentTimeline.append( myClass1.animateOut(), 5);
parentTimeline.append( myClass2.animateIn() );
parentTimeline.append( myClass2.animateOut(), 5);
...

 

Then you could control the entire animation like parentTimeline.gotoAndPlay(5) or pause() or reverse() or whatever. Or hook up a slider to the currentTime property. Lots of possibilities.

 

4) Show the Plugin Explorer examples

 

5) Tween the timeScale property of a TweenMax, TimelineLite, or TimelineMax to speed up or slow it down.

 

6) Show how to use relative values in tweens (pass them in as a String instead of Number)

 

7) Demonstrate some of the nifty bonus classes like SplitTextField (http://blog.greensock.com/splittextfield/) or plugins like motionBlur, physics, transformAroundPoint, etc. (see the Plugin Explorer)

 

Hope that helps. Let me know if you need anything else. And if you haven’t seen http://blog.greensock.com/timeline-basics/ yet, it may be worth watching (I bet you’ve already seen it though). I hope to release the more advanced video in the next few weeks.

[mgason]

Thanks for those, I will have a play.

I am doing draw a rectangle with tweenmax.

Can you just tween a number?

As in say tween from 0 to 100 and feed that value to a textbox?

If so how?

 

thanks

Mark

[GreenSock]

Wait - I'm confused - you want to draw a Rectangle and you want to feed values to a TextField? Help me understand how those are related? Are you trying to draw the outline of a rectangle over the course of time? Are you trying to make a number in a TextField count from 0 to 100 over a certain number of seconds? You can do either one - I just need to know what exactly you're looking for.