Following on from our previous post: “How to make Animations and Animated Graphics in Adobe Fireworks“, we’ve now got the basic knowledge of making an animation in Adobe Fireworks. We can animate a graphic, moving it a small amount, each frame, across a series of frames to make the final result appear as if our graphic is actually in full motion.

Our tutorial today is going to cover the rest of Adobe Fireworks’ useful tools and commands for making animation even easier and more impressive looking! We’re going to use symbols and tweening, a method of animation that became popular in Adobe Flash. We’ll also take a look at onion skinning and distributing to frames, all techniques that are useful for animation in Fireworks.

Here’s what we want to achieve (click to see a bigger view):

Our stickman is going to move from A - B across 12 frames, and the waves will do the same but at a slower speed. Unlike our last Fireworks Animated Stickman tutorial, we’re only going to need to animate 2 frames (A - B) and Fireworks will do the tweening - which is short for inbetweening (doing everything in between frames A and B).

Read on to find out how simple it is to animate our surfing stickman…

1. First of all, you’ll need our example file which you can download here. Once you’ve downloaded it, open it in Adobe Fireworks.

2. In our example file, we have two groups of vector graphics. One group makes up our surfing stickman and the other the wave. Let’s start by converting these groups to symbols, which they need to be to allow tweening.

• Open the Layers inspector by either pressing F2 on your keyboard or clicking Window > Layers.
• Select the Surfer group in the Layers inspector.
• Now convert this group to a symbol by either pressing F8 or clicking Modify > Symbol > Convert to Symbol.
• Let’s give this symbol the name of Surfer and Type: Graphic, then click OK.

We can then select our Wave group in the Layers inspector and do exactly the same as we just did to Convert the Wave to a symbol. This time we’ll call it Wave and give it the Type: Graphic.

3. Our Surfer and Wave symbols are currently in the start position (A), so now let’s copy them and put them in the end position (B).

We’re going to ignore animating the wave for the moment and concentrate on the surfer, we’ll come back to the wave afterwards:

• Choose the Surfer in the Layers inspector again and then click Edit > Copy. Now click Edit > Paste. You should then see another Surfer symbol has appeared in the Layers inspector.
• We want this surfer behind the wave, so in the Layers inspector, drag the top layer Surfer down under the waves layer. Our Layers should then be in the order of Wave, Surfer (B), Surfer (A).
• Select the bottom layer surfer and move it to the end (B) position, as shown above. Tip: To move your surfer you can drag him, hold the right cursor key on the keyboard to move a pixel at a time (hold shift and the right cursor key to move 10 pixels at a time) or change his X coordinate in the properties inspector (our X coordinate is 252).

4. We now have our surfer at the start and end position (A and B) and that’s our job done! Now to get Fireworks to finish the animation for us:

• Select both of the Surfer symbols in the Layers inspector by clicking one, hold down CTRL on the keyboard and then clicking the other.
• Click Modify > Symbol > Tween Instances… to open the tweening properties.
• We are then asked how many steps are to be taken in between the A and B position of our surfer. Let’s keep it at 10. This means after position A, Fireworks will then move our surfer a tenth of the way towards position B, then another tenth until it reaches position B, the end.
• We want this to happen over frames as this is going to be an animation, so let’s also select ‘Distribute to frames’ in the Tween Instances box, then click OK. Fireworks may take a while to implement the Tweening (if you selected 100 steps it may take a couple of minutes!).
• Once done, you will notice the surfer in position B has disappeared. Don’t worry! It’s just because our surfer’s are now distributed across frames and we are looking at the first frame of the animation.

5. Our stickman is now surfing across the canvas, but how do we test it? Click the play button above your properties inspector. You’ll see the stickman smoothly surf across the canvas, albeit on an empty sea. We’ll come to finish the sea shortly, but let’s take a look at the Frames inspector to find out what Fireworks just did to make our stickman surf.

You’ll notice at the top of the Layers inspector, there’s different tabs along with the Layers tab. Click the Frames tab. We can then see 12 frames (more if you chose more than 10 steps in the Tween Instances box). We explained how to change the timing of each frame in our previous post: “How to make Animations and Animated Graphics in Adobe Fireworks”, so we won’t go into full detail here. Briefly, the number next to each frame is the amount of milliseconds that frame will last for. By default, it’s set to 7, which is perfect for making our animation nice and smooth. We’re not going to change these but feel free to experiment and revert back to our previous post should you want to find out more about frame timing.

Something useful for looking at all frames in one go is the ‘onion skinning’ feature. At the bottom of your Frames/Layers inspector, click the Onion Skinning button and then ‘Show All Frames’. We can now see our surfer spanning across all frames.

6. All we need do now is tween the waves using the options in step 3, let’s recap:

• Copy the waves symbol and paste a duplicate copy.
• Move the new waves symbol (the top most layer) to the right, we’re going to move ours 120px so each frame it will move 10px.
• Select both of the wave symbols and click Modify > Symbol > Tween Instances…
• Choose 10 steps and distribute across frames, then click OK.

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