Basic Morphing in Swish

As we know, Flash is capable of complex morphing, for example:

And really we can safely say its virtually impossible with SWiSH.

However, by using a technique called 'Frame-by-frame Animation', Simple Morphing is possible in SWiSH.

A simple morphing effect I created in a matter of minutes.

This simple tutorial will explain how to create basic shape morphing effects...

Of course you start by making the shape you wish to morph...

1. Depending on the smoothness you want your morph to be copy and paste the shape about 10 times. (The more times you copy the smoother the effect but the bigger the movie size).

2. Now you want to add the place and remove effects.

At frame 0 on the original shape add a place effect. Then on the frame next to it (1) add a remove effect.

On the same frame on the copied shape below add a place effect. Keep doing this until all the shapes have their own place and remove effects. It should loom something like this:

3. Now comes the tricky part.

You need to have a fairly good idea of how you want your shape to morph into the final shape.

Start by going to the place effect of the first copy, the shape should now be surrounded by red squares.

On the layout panel click the 'reshape' button

You can now reshape your first copy of the object.

If you right click at a point on your shapes outline you can add new points.

Say we were morphing a square into a triangle we would reshape the first copy to something like this:

If you want the colour of the shape to change also simply apply a color to the shape that you would find appropriate for that stage in morphing.

For example if we were morphing from red to yellow and we were on the middle copy we would change its color to orange. Previous copies would be darker and darker.

4. All you have to do now is the above steps for all of the shapes.

Once you are finished have a preview and fix any errors where you may have reshaped it a bit too much, or added the wrong color.

5. Select all the shapes and group them as a sprite, this will keep them contained and your timeline tidy.

Name the sprite 'Morph'

That's it!

Enjoy...