January 22, 2006

Blending Groups

Just about everyone knows that you can use blends in Illustrator in order to generate the necessary steps in an animation. However, most folks also look at each item individually and only blend between two objects. Well, Illustrator's blends are far more powerful than that -- and when you create a group and make a blend between two groups, you can get a lot more animation for your dollar (or yen, or ruble, wherever you hail from).

As an example, if we wanted to create an animation of a sun setting behind a mountain, and that as the sun sets, the sky gets darker and the mountains darken as well, you could do so simply by creating a single group that contains all three elements: the sky, the mountains, and the sun. You could then duplicate the group and change the elements (change the colors of the sky and mountains and move the position of the sun) and then simply blend between the two groups, as you see below.



To complete the Flash animation, you don't even have to release the blend to layers. The Flash export dialog in Illustrator CS2 has an option which will automatically animate blends without your having to expand them.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

The option to automatically release blends into a flash animation is one of the greatest features in CS2!! (It was added in CS2, yes?)

Anonymous said...

Here's another important tip:

By default, blends are created as Knockout Groups. This gives the kind of results generally wanted when doing the kind of blends where a solid color object shades into a transparent object, and the whole blend is placed over something else. But when making blends between groups containing transparency, it cancels out transparency within each frame. For example, if your sun had an outer glow effect applied, those effects would appear solid in the resulting blend. So when making blends between groups for the purpose of animation, you will nearly always want to turn off the Knockout Group attribute after making the blend if the frames contain transparency.

Anonymous said...

Here's my take on Mordy's sunset blend, with transparency. (Warning: since it uses raster effects like Outer Glow and Gaussian Blur, and Illustrator's raster effects cause a whole lot of separate images to be included in the swf file, it is pretty big to download. It would actually be smaller as an animated gif.)

Good night sun

Unknown said...

As always Teri, your insight and excellent examples are second to none.

Anonymous said...

When watching that animation, I found myself thinking that it really should have audio of crickets chirping as the stars came out.

brain bomb said...

I love using blends, especially when distributing objects. I tend to blend 2 shapes together (2 stars for instance) and then replace the spine with something like a circle. Then I end up with a bunch of stars following a circle. The problem is, I always have to add an anchor point at the beginning of the path or the stars will not complete the circle.

Is there an easier way to accomplish this, or do I always have to add an anchor point to get the shapes to complete the path (spine)?

Anonymous said...

You dont have to add an anchor point for that process, Use the Scissor Tool to cut the path of the circle to be able to distribute the stars along the circular path.

Try this if you want to distribute objects on a circular path precisely:

Select the star object then click on the "Rotate Tool". Before
rotating the object try repositioning the "rotate point" by 'Alt' clicking anywhere within the Artboard, for example about 2 cm south away from the selected star (it should open the rotate option dialog box). Put 40 degrees then click on "copy". After that Press Ctrl-D to repeat the process until it covers an entire circle.

Hope this helps

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