Morphing

Shape hints

Shape hints help the designer to account for appearance of the drawing between keyframes. They are placed in pairs. The first hint is ported to the point at the initial drawing while it’s matching pair is placed to the drawing in final keyframe.

It will guarantee that “hinted” point will finish exactly in the point where it’s counterpart is located.

Create a new file and add simple “rectangle – circle” shape tweening.

To place a shape hint use the Modify-Shape-Add Shape Hint. Hint will appear in the frame you are highlighted as a small red circle with the letter for reference (to avoid mixing up hint pairs). When you highlight the next morphing keyframe you will see the matching hint with the same letter. Port it to the desired point at the drawing. You will see that hints change their colour. The initial one became yellow and final one turned green.

Test your movie. Add more hints if necessary – experiment with them.

In example below the first part of animation uses shape hints placed on the sides of the circle and corresponding rectangle. The second part of the movie (after the mouse roll-out) shows the effect when shape hints were switched to the opposite sides. One that was at the bottom of the rectangle is placed on the top of the circle and vice versa.

If you decided you don’t need a shape hint – place a cursor on it and activate a right click mouse menu – you will see Delete Shape Hint command. You also may delete all shape hints at once.

Accuracy and proper shape hinting allows to create quite complicated and impressife animation like this one. Click movie below to run it.

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