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Shape tweens are so unpredictable that you may not have seen the exact same results that I saw even though we started with the same graphics. Our shape tween is very dependent on the elements, how they were drawn and how they removed. So, if your tween work fine, you will not have to worry about this but if you are seeing some kind of a little twist or flip operation the way I did, here is the way to go in and fix it.

We really only have one tool or a disposal for shape tweens and that is what is called a Shape Hint. So, I am going to go in to my first keyframe. That is our starter frame and I am going into Modify Shape and you see down here at the bottom, we have a selection that will allow us to add a Shape Hint. I will click on that and you can see what we get is a little dot in here with a letter A in it. Now, it might help to even zoom in so I am just going to zoom in here a little bit. And, you can see that dot. What I want to do is place this dot which is our hint on to our shape object. I am going to do that best making sure snapping is turned on. I got my selection tool and I am going to go over to the tooth that is a problem and I am just going to pick out a corner of the tooth and snap the shape hint to that corner.

Now, let us go over to our ending keyframe. You notice it also has an A dot. What I want to do is I want to snap this to the corresponding corner of the same tooth. Now, you can see the problem we had is we had one corner tweening into another corner. But by setting the shape painting here, we are basically telling it to take the top right corner of the first tooth in the first keyframe and map it to the top right corner of the first tooth in the second keyframe. Now, let us see how well that did for us. I am just going to scrub along my timeline. You can see that my shape hint actually did work. If we watch just that corner, it is mapping one corner to another.

Now the problem is in fixing that one corner. We kind of messed up a couple of the other corners. So, let us see if we can get it fixed. I am just going to add another shape hint. I will go back to the first keyframe. We got a chance to try it again. Now remember, my animation maybe different than yours so you have to adopt accordingly. I will go back to shape, add another shape hint and you can see that this one has a B on it. I am kind of hoping that the second one will fix everything. I am going snap it to the bottom corner. I will go to the second keyframe here and I will snap this one to the bottom corner. We will cross our fingers and now I am getting a tooth that works out reasonably well.

Now as I said, sometimes our shape tweens can be a little bit unpredictable. In certain cases, it may take no shape tweens at all. In some other cases, you might find yourself adding four, five, maybe six shape tweens. For me, if I get out to five or six, I am usually going to stop and try something else. Maybe even redrawing the shapes or separating things out into layers but you have to experiment on your own to see how it is going to work for you if I add a lot to our animation, I think it is time to zoom back out and see what we have done. Let me see if I can center this guy up here. I am going to unlock all my layers and I can do that very quickly by just clicking on the lock to lock all the layers and then clicking once again to unlock all the layers. I will roll my play head back to frame one. Let us see what our animation is looking like. I am going to use my Return Key to start the playback head once again. I think it still have leaping turned on so we can see how this is going to end up. We got a pretty good little emotion scene going on with our robot getting zapped and then looking like he is happy about this hopping. So, we got a pretty good object going in there. I encourage you to try out some other settings on the tween just for practice.

Shape tweens are so unpredictable that you may not have seen the exact same results that I saw even though we started with the same graphics. Our shape tween is very dependent on the elements, how they were drawn and how they removed. So, if your tween work fine, you... click to read more