Macromedia Flash 8 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual Quickstart Guide

5. Complex Graphics on a Single Layer

In Chapters 2 and 4, you learned to make and modify simple individual shapes from lines (strokes) and fills by using Macromedia Flash 8’s drawing tools. In your movies, you’ll want to use many shapes together, and you’ll need to combine strokes and fills in complex ways. You might combine several shapes, such as ovals and rectangles, to create a robot character, for example. To work effectively with complex graphics, you must understand how multiple graphic elements—both merge-shapes and drawing objects—interact when they’re on the same layer or on different layers. In this chapter, you learn how to work with multiple graphic elements on one layer in a Flash document. To learn more about the concept of layers, ...