In this tutorial video we're gonna learn about how to create motion guides in
Adobe animate CC so motion guide is basically drawing a path, and then animating an object along that path very easily
so in this particular
project we've already had some layers that are pre-built just to save time and
The top two layers we have an airplane guide and an airplane layer so on the airplane layer
I'm gonna put a movie clip and it is of an airplane and
I'm gonna pop it over here because I want my airplane to swoop in
Go in a circle go in a bigger circle and then fly out
That would be hard to create with just regular motion tweens
But if we use the pencil tool to draw our path we can tell the movie clip or the airplane to follow that path
So on the airplane guide layer. I'll go ahead and lock everything else
grab the pencil tool
Go to properties make sure it's you know it doesn't really matter
What color it is or the thickness?
But I like mine to be pretty thin and black just so I can see it
And then you want to make sure that it is in pencil mode, and you probably can't see that
But when you click on this you can choose smooth that way whatever you draw, it's gonna smooth it out so on
Frame one. I'll go ahead and
What happened in pencil okay? I will go ahead and draw my loop
Trying to be as smooth as possible
And then a second one and then fly out
So the problem with this is that it has some of these bumps and sometimes that's not too bad and sometimes it makes it
Weeble wobble, and it looks weird, so I'll probably undo that and try to do something a little bit more smooth
Okay so that may or may not work
So you might have to draw that motion guide a couple of times so on the airplane guide layer
You can right click and choose guide, and I you can't see that either
But choose guide or you can go to properties and then change the type of layer to guide here
You can see when you turn it into a guide layer a little hammer
It means that it's a guide, but it doesn't have anything to guide yet
We need to tell the airplane layer to be a part of that guide layer
So we're gonna click and drag it underneath the airplane guide even though it already is it's gonna kind of indent
So once it indents that guide layer will turn into
This kind of Caterpillar looking curve, and that tells you that there. It is actually guiding something so
In order to make a guide work
I'll go ahead and lock it and unlock the airplane what you want to do is you want to have your object?
Move and have its kind of center
pivot point
Right at the very tip of the guide
Then we want to click on insert
Create classic tween and you'll see that it kind of shifted a little bit so that it would actually be at the very start
When we look at the classic tween it has all these dashes saying that it's broken and the reason why is because at the very
End of our animation we don't have another keyframe, so it knows what it should look like at the beginning
And what it should look like at the end so moving our playhead over to the very last frame of this guided layer
We will click and drag and pop it again right on to the very end
So if we scrub this playhead we should be able to see that it is in fact following the guide
So let's do command return or control enter to test the movie and see how that looks
So it looks good, and it's following the guide, so it's doing exactly what it should be doing
It's just a little bit weird because it's not
really following it in an
oriented manner
so let's go ahead and
Change the orientation of this in order to change the orientation the first thing you have to do is on the first keyframe
click on your object
Grab the transform tool, and then rotate it so that it's going in the same direction as the direction of your guide
So since our guide is moving down we will angle our plane, so it's going down
Then we move to the very last keyframe
And we do the exact same thing we click the object and then move it in the direction that our guide is moving
So let's see what that looks like
Okay, so it's weird because it's a little bit of a tilt
But it's still not quite right but once we've set those two
what we can do is go back to our timeline click on the classic tween and
Then in the properties panel you should be able to click on orient to path
now when it goes through the animation it will follow along the guide and
Actually flip and do all these different stunts because it's now oriented to the path
Let's preview this one more time
Okay, so as you can see it gets a little bit of a weeble wobble so I might work on making a smoother motion path
But I did a fairly complicated
animation very quickly with a motion guide that would take me a long time with a motion tween so
Let's see what else motion guide can do a motion guide can also change different properties
Such as color along the path and scale along the path so in this instance
I have games stunts and food and there are just three different words that we want to have guide along the layer
So let's go ahead and create our guide first. I'm gonna grab the
line tool and
I'm gonna create a line well. We'll just create a line right now
let's unlock that and
Lock the other one. We're gonna create one line and just drag it a little bit past the edges of the stage and
Then what we can do is we can actually grab the width tool and for this particular guide right in the middle
I want it to get a little bit thick and what that's gonna do is gonna have the word go from small to big
To small again, so that's gonna give it some dynamic movement in
Addition if I change the guide to different colors, let's say for instance I wanted to do a linear gradient
Then I can have it change colors, so let's go ahead. I'll change this from white
On the edges, and then it's gonna go to pink so it's gonna change colors in it
You can see this easier
If you do really drastic color, so if you're trying this out for the first time do that drastic color in fact
We'll go ahead and change this to like a deep blue so that you can see the change that's going to happen with that
All right, so we need now that we have our guide. We need things to actually guide so on this food layer
I'll come over here, and I have a movieclip. That's called MC. Food and that's locked so I got it
Change that so also notice that with my guide
It is a guided layer, so don't forget to right-click and make this a guided layer
And then with food I need to click and drag
Same for stunts same for games. I need to drag all of those so that they are all guided layers so on stunts
I'll go ahead and I don't even have that movie clip, so we're just gonna ignore that one for now and then for games
We'll pop that in there alright
so each one of these we want to have them guided by this guide, so we'll work on food for right now and
Again, we're gonna pop that right there, and we're gonna go to insert
classic tween and
I made it black because black is gonna show all the colors in whatever pure
Form you have on the guide layer if you make your font white to start with it
Won't show any of the colors if you choose a color other than black like if you made
It orange then when it gets here
It's gonna make mix the orange with the pink and give you a weird color
So just know that the best thing for this is to make your font black
So just like the other
Motion guide that we created it
Has a keyframe on the the start of the guide?
But it has a broken
Classic tween because it needs to know what you want to have it look like at the very end of the tween so
We'll go ahead and move food over here
And then it gets that solid arrow and you can see that it is in fact moving along the guide right now
It's just moving in a straight line so it's kind of it seems tedious because we could have just done a quick move
motion tween with this
but the reason why
You do this one is because now we can choose the color along the path so you can see that it turned blue. Let me
change that
color or turn off that motion guide
So you can see it goes from white to pink and then it's gonna go to blue and then
If we click on that classic tween again, we can also scale along the path
So if we scale it we can see that it goes from
Small to big to small again
But notice that it's really really really big and that's because any kind of change in that motion guide this
actual guide line
Even though this looks really small if you started out or with it with a kind of big word
then it's gonna make it super big so your options for this are to come over here, and then click on the food and
change the width and height at the beginning and
Then change the width and height at the very end so we'll come over here click on that and change it there
Readjust it reposition it so okay now
It is going to go from big to little it went a little bit too small
so
Maybe we just need to undo what what happened on the last keyframe, so
All right, so
There we go so it's much bigger. You only have to change out on the very first one and then it'll go back
so that works pretty well so again for the games we can do the same thing we can move games down here and
we can make it smaller and
Oops, let me lock the food and then grab games make it a little bit bigger than that
Move it down
Alright, so there
It is and do insert classic tween and it's going to look broken until we change what it looks like at this point
so we're gonna move it down here and
Then the last thing we have to do is in the middle we have to say color along the path and scale along the path
Now the problem with this is if we watch it
They're gonna happen at the same time so control control return our well control enter or command return
So they're gonna happen at the same time, and they go really really slow
So you're gonna have to come back with those motion guides and just start changing
when things happen so let's say, I wanted that to start at 10, and I'm gonna move these keyframes back and
Maybe I want this one to last
about that long and
Then I want this one to start maybe it can start coming in about halfway
Across and then bring that down
And you probably want to make them about the same visual length so that you have good pacing these broken
Classic tween, it's just because you don't have a keyframe here, but since they're not going to be animated anyway
You don't have to worry about that you can also highlight any of the frames you don't want
Right-click and choose remove frames if you need it to so let's watch this
Alright so food comes in games comes in so it looks like those are a little bit too fast
So you might want to slow them down?
But that's an easy way to create complex motion using a motion guide in a classic tween whether for movement or
To actually do different property changes along that motion guide