Custom Flash Motion Presets – Automatic preview plug in
There is now a plug in for generating .swf previews for your custom flash motion presets so you will no longer need to do the manual motion preset preview way which was mentioned in the previous post.
The flash motion plug in can be found here.
This should make sharing custom flash motion presets easier and quicker. To upload this files you should have easier access to the .xml flash motion preset.
Making a flash motion preset tutorial
Step 1) Make your animation using a motion tween. You can do this in the all new motion editor. So once you have this set then drag the animation on the timeline to your speed you like.
Step 2) Open up the motion set panel.
You should have a few default presets with a preview, if you roll down to custom presets. There is a new icon on the bottom left (looks like a new layer from photoshop) called save selection as preset. Once you click this you will be asked to give it a name. This should save under the custom presets folder.
Note unlike the default flash presets you have no preview for this animation. How ever this is easy to be fixed.
Step 3) Putting in the preview file for the flash motion presets. First thing you will do is render out a .swf example of the preset in action. With this file then copy the .swf and put it in the following folder:
For Mac: User Name/Library/ Applications Support / Adobe / Flash CS 4/ EN / Configuration / Motion Presets /
For PC it would be something similar like, not 100% sure:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Adobe etc..
When you go to this file you will be able to see a .xml file of the preset you just saved. In that xml file is all the data needed to redo the animation.
Now paste in the .swf file that you had that is an example of the flash motion preset. If you called the preset lets say “slinky” you should see slinky.xml you now have to rename that .swf file slink.swf so what ever the .xml file is you need to rename the matching swf file the same this will link them up.
So after that you should have a folder with something like slinky.xml slinky.swf
The preview should now show up back inside cs4.
Well done you have made your first preset with a preview, you may have to restart flash to see it!