Drawing in CS5

This doesn't involve any actionscripting, but there are a number of new brushes in CS5 that havent appeared in earlier ones. Presumably you will be familiar with the normal drawing tools that are similar to illustrator so I will not explain them here. The new element is the deco brush!

Deco brush


There are many deco brushes to choose from. Some will paint things on your stage, some will generate an animation over a range of frames. If you have symbols, you can insert it as the symbol to be animated (in a particle system or something other).



The only thing to note is that you should edit the Advanced options before you click on the stage with this brush. You may need to try it out first before you decide on the settings as once you've painted it you can't tweak it.

You can manually create animations of particles without actionscripting this way. I still recommend you learn actionscripting to use particles (see: Snowflake) but if you find that hurdle too hard to cross at this stage, at least try the deco brush.

http://dreamsyntax.org/patterns/swf/donutparticles.swf

Bones
There isn't enough time to explain bones today (this is also not quite an animation class so it is not so relevant) but I may write a tutorial for it some time in the future.