Learn How to Apply and Transform Gradients in Macromedia Flash 8
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That about does it for strokes. Let us take a look at fills. If I select a fill in here, the first thing we will notice is that everything is grayed out because all of these are the same settings we just used for strokes and they are not for fills. Where are we going to find our fill settings? To change the fills, we are going to go back up to our color mixer. And, our primary fill setting is going to be up in a type window you can see that most of the time here, we have been working with solid fills but we actually have a few choices. Specifically, I want to go over gradients right now. Now, a lot of you might have used gradients before. They are simply ramps of color instead of using a single color. So let us pick out some place on our drawing where we want to take a look at this. Now, we have got our sun shining down on our flower here. Let me pick out one of these leaves and we will zoom up on it and I pick out the fill here. And what we are going to want to do is we are getting to modify that fill color and instead of it being a solid, we are going to make it into a linear gradient.
Now you can see because I have it selected, we can already see a preview with that gradient dropped in here. It has selected up a green gradient which is actually perfect for our conditions but I can change these all around. Now, the gradient is previewed in the window down below just like the color was but above it, I have got a controller line that allows me to set whatever the ramp of color is that we are going to be using as our gradient here. Now these two chips are going to control the gradient and I can set these ones by clicking on each one of the chips and setting it to whatever color I would like. You can see the changes previewed below. When I set the color, it is going to gradually transition from that color to whatever the target color is. And of course, I can change this chip as well to any other color I would like. So we can really design whatever kinds of gradients we want. Just exploring this gradient ramp control window, I can add more colors just by clicking in between the two chips. You can see I got a plus sign for my selection cursor right there and that will just add another chip. I can control it exactly the same way as the last two and I can even set position of this as well as the other chips as well. So I can really get in a very custom design gradient to match whatever kind of ramp I would like to put in here. If you ever want to get rid off one of these color chips, simply grab it and pull it away and you will see you will be back to the original two chips there.
Now, I am going to something like what we started with which is kind of a light green going down to a darker green. And a lot of times, what we are using these gradients for is to simulate light and shadow as it flows across a live object. In referring back to our screen here, we are talking about the sun shining down in our plant so we would naturally see light on the forward side of the leaf and some shadow on the back side of the leaf. Now I can see a preview dropped in to here but even though the colors look right, the positioning of the light is not quite right for the shape of the leaf that I have got here. So the first part of every gradient is setting the colors that we are going to be using. The second part is setting this angling and positioning and I am going to do that by again selecting that fill. And, we are going to use another tool in companion with this, a tool palette gradient transform tool. The keyboard shortcut is the letter F for that and when I click on that I am going to get a few handles here. Now let us go to these handles one by one so we can see exactly what they do. Probably, the first to take a look at is this one at the top. Now there are two very thin lines that you could probably barely see on this gradient that I have chosen. That is going to show me the length of the gradient where it starts from the light green and goes to the dark green. What I am really doing is I am changing these brackets around.
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