MACROMEDIA FLASH  MX 2004

Alejandra Jarabo
MAT 116-0081
Media Arts & Technologies Division. Santa Barbara City College
CREATING / NESTING SYMBOLS

The best way of producing small, compact, and effective Flash projects is to Structure your movie in such a way that basic reusable element are converted into Symbols, those elements are repeated on Stage and then incorporated into bigger symbols, that are either directly used on Stage or even reused on ocassion (this is called symbol-Nesting, or embedding a symbol inside another symbol).

There are several ways of creating Symbols as you advance in your project.

  

Basically you can :

  • CONVERT a shape, group of shapes, or group of symbols into a New symbol,
  • You can INSERT a new symbol and create your artwork inside it,
  • You can work on Stage, and when you get something interesting, copy the content of your layers (Copy Frames), then INSERT a new symbol, then paste that content (Paste Frames) into your New symbol.
Down here you can follow an animation on" How to create a simple symbol by using the CONVERT TO SYMBOL command":
     
     
     

In the next page you can follow an animation on how to NEST symbols as you go, with the COPY>INSERT NEW SYMBOL>PASTE protocol.