Guides and Guided layers - Feb 15th, 2008

1. There are four pairs of guide/guided layers for a total of 8 layers.
2. The 9th layer contains the earth or the central planet and also contains the Pasted in Place graphic of all 4 of the guide layers Oval forms with the chunk erased out of them so the Planet can have a start point and a finish point for following the guide.
3. Layers can have 6 different Type choices: Normal, Mask, Masked, Guide, Guided and Folder.
4. The Guided layers have a Motion Tween that goes between two KeyFrames.
1. KF1 has the registration point of the object (planet) aligned right on top of the start of your line or oval.
2. KF2 has the registration point of the object aligned right over the end of your line or the other end of your broken circle or oval.
3. The line or the Oval with the erased segment is in a separate layer ABOVE the layer with the planet it will guide.
4. For precise positioning of the object that will be guided to the line or segment it, I like to use the ZooM tool. It has keyboard shortcut of either Z or M, which is why I wrote Zoom instead of Zoom here. Of course, to quickly get back to looking at the entire stage after Zooming way in to 500% or more, just do the Fit In Window Choice from the Scene 1 bar.
5. The Guide layer graphic does NOT have to be a Symbol.
6. Reuse the One Oval you made.
   1. It was made with the Fill Color set to null and the Stroke Color set to black (or any color).
      1. This makes it a hollow oval, i.e. just the outline of a circle or oval. It is unfilled.
      2. The Eraser tool cuts the hole or gap in it. A narrow gap is best for your smooth animation of an orbit.
   2. The above example made one OVAL and erased a segment from it using the Eraser tool.
   3. That guide path incomplete Oval was then Edit menu Copied to the Clipboard and Edit menu Pasted in Place.
   4. The Modify menu, Transform submenu, Scale and Rotate commands were then used to Rotate it -45 or 45 or 90 degrees to get the 4 different orbit patterns you see above.
7. We used the History Panel ( not to be confused with the History Channel! :-) ) and created several custom commands in doing this exercise on Friday, February 15th. That will be reviewed on Monday in class, before the quiz two.
8. A handout from today's class showing the timeline and the layers will be given out again on Monday, February 18th. It will be updated from today's version to include some new features.