Page 557 - Xara Designer Pro X17

Animations 557

• Any transparency type other than mix.
• Feathering.
• All complex graduated fills (conical, diamond, 3 color etc).
• All complex graduated transparency styles (as above). (You can use linear, and
elliptical transparency on flat color filled objects.)
• Live Effects.

The following object types will export in static Flash, but do not animate.
• Soft shadows.
• Bevels.
• Contours.
• Blends.
• Molds.

So while some Xara Designer Pro X effects, such as soft shadows and bevels do work in
static files, these are exported as bitmaps into the Flash file, so they are not very efficient
and not suitable for animating.
What can be animated:

As listed at the start of this chapter, these are the golden rules as to what you can
change from one keyframe to the next:

• Move: Move objects from one position to another.
• Scale: Enlarge or reduce objects in size.
• Squash or skew: Squash or skew objects.
• Rotate: Rotate objects.
• Transparency: Adjust the overall (flat) transparency of the object.
• Color transform: Change the fill (flat) color of objects.
• Or any combination of the above.

In addition, there are a few special cases of photo color transformations that are
supported by Flash. You can alter the saturation (so you can tween a full color photo into
a black and white one), You can also adjust the temperature color control (warm / cool),
and also the blur value. The latter enables you to tween a blurred photo into a sharp one.
But note this only works for blur values and not sharpen. Also there is a slight difference
in the way Flash blurs photos. Flash blurs the whole photo including the edge, whereas
the Photo blur in Xara Designer Pro X only blurs the inside of the photo and keeps a
sharp edge.
Secondly, another special case: you can animate text on a curve. This is special because
you can use this to seemingly morph text along one curve into text along a completely
different curve. In fact what it does is tween from the character position in one keyframe
to the corresponding character’s position in the next frame. This can produce some
interesting effects.