Basic Filters in Flash 8 and Up
Categories: Flash
This is another tutorial that I made a while ago.
Ok children, today we are going to learn about the filters feature in Flash 8 and up. These filters are great in making your flash graphics and animations more attractive.
First of all, we need to know what a filter is. With filters in flash, you can easily give movieclips, buttons, and text special effects, like glowing or blurring. Doing this usually only requires a few steps.
The first step is to actually draw the shape that you wish to apply a filter to. I’m going to simply make a square.
Next, we’re gonna have to convert it into a symbol. You can do this by selecting the shape and pressing F8. A box similar to this will pop up:
Ok, so far so good? Well, I’m gonna keep going anyway, there’s an example file below if you have issues. If you want to, you can name it. I’m going to name my symbol “box”. Make sure that “Movie clip” is checked off, and click ok. Your symbol should now have a thin blue bounding box around it.
Now that we have a symbol, all we need to do is add a filter. If you haven’t been messing around with Flash too much, then there should be a tab next to properties near the bottom named “Filters”. It should look like this:
If you don’t see it, then don’t worry. All you have to do is go to the top menu and navigate to Window -> Properties -> Filters.
Click it and the filters tab should pop up.
Now, with your symbol selected, click on the little plus button in the filters tab.
When you click it, a menu should pop up with a bunch of choices for filters. You can choose and of these later, but right now I want you to choose Glow. If you look at your symbol, you should see that it is indeed glowing.
You should also notice some properties in the Filters Tab. You can play around with these if you like, they are quite useful.
Congratulations! You have now put a filter onto a symbol! If you want, you can even put multiple filters on the same symbol. It’s a wacky world isn’t it? This is what I was able to come up with. You can probably do much more:
Did you have some issues? Click on one of the links below to download an example file.
Flash 8
Flash CS3
