Learn How to Edit the Contents of a Group in Macromedia Flash 8
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Now we took a look at what to make into a group. I mentioned that you could basically select anything you got on the screen, anything selectable and that actually includes other groups. I have got two eyes in a group and let us just say I wanted to create a group out of both of them. I could Shift+Select the second eye. I did Shift+Select because if I marquee right now, I would probably grab half of his face. I can take those two selections and I will group them as well. Once again, Command G or Ctrl G for the PC and there you can see I have got a group containing both of the eyes. Now, what is interesting about that is, we have got a group that contains other groups. So if we run down through the navigation path of the group, if I double click on this just like the last group. I go into that group, you can see everything grayed up just like before except for the two elements.
Once I am inside that group, I can see the contents which are two other group objects. I can double click again if I wanted to change this eyeball. And now I am down to the level of the vector shapes inside that group. If we take a little glance up the navigation bar at the top, you can see it does show that I came from scene one. I went in to the group with the two eyeballs and from there, I went to the one on the left. Now that is one of the back buttons there. I could backtrack my way back out, in which case, now I mean, the first group, one with both eyeballs, and I get back again out to scene one. You can definitely see that the Where you are question is going to be an important one. I would recommend glancing up at that line and including it in the tools that you look at the program just to make sure you are grounded. It is a little bit disconcerting when you are inside of a group like this and you try to figure out what should I work on. So, just another thing that you want to be aware of is work around three groups. I want to go back to scene one. I will just click on scene one to get out of it.
Now I would like to make another group because I would like to talk about groups themselves and how they interact with each other. I want to make a group out of these eyeglasses over here. Now, I could probably just double click that one and select and that will get me the whole connected series of strokes that we have making up these eyeglasses. I will group that and once again, Command G or Ctrl G on the PC. I have got my group in here. Here is a place I probably need to add. I had his eyes a little bit close together I think. So I might go in, edit that group, and you can see how I can move those eyes apart. Now, very interestingly here, we are going to talk about stacking. You notice while I am inside this group, the eyes appear on top of the glasses. But as soon as I leave the group, the glasses appear on top of the eyeballs.
Well, the groups have a stacking order as well. It is kind of like a mini set of layers. Now, remember we are inside one single layer here. So inside the layer, my groups are going to stack themselves accordingly. The way my drawing appears, the glasses are on top of the eyes, mainly because that is the last group I made so it is going to go on top. Whenever you edit a group, it temporarily pulls that group up to the front of the stack just to make it easier for you to edit. You can still see the elements around it as reference. And as soon as you finish editing the group, it is going to go back to its proper place in the stack. Now I can change the stacking order of the layers at any time but obviously, I am not going to be dragging things around because they are not real layers. They are just my group pseudo layers inside there. To change the order of things, I can select the group and I would use the modify menu and arrange. You can see we have some pretty familiar controls, bring them to front, bring forward, send backward, and send to back.
Now, these two steps at the top and the bottom bring to the front or pull whatever layer you got selected completely to the front of the stack and likewise, will send it completely to the
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