~How to use Flash part two
SO HEY FOR EVERYONE WHO MISSED ULTRAMEGA OK
ECO_MONO HELPFULLY RECORDED IT! So go check it out. :B
Checking out DoD as usual, and this Actraiser remix jumped out at me. I love Actraiser, it was totally a huge thing for me as a kid. I loved the building aspect of it, just raising little towns and helping people. I LOVE SIM GAMES. I was not so good at the sidescrolling part. But I also especially loved the music (oh BIG SURPRISE I hear out there).
But anyway, this sucker is ELEVEN MINUTES LONG but it really weaves together a lot of the themes from the game in a really awesome way. I especially love near the end how it brings in the Kasandora theme after that one guy dies (GOD I love that theme it gives me goosebumps everytime) and the theme when you're in your sky palace it's like ♥
Anyway, continuing with my rambly little Flash tutorial. I'm assuming you read the first part and have a basic understanding of what symbols and tweening are, although I'm going to get into more detail here. THIS TIME I'M ALSO GOING TO INCLUDE CONCRETE EXAMPLES FROM MY OWN MOVIES OF WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT so hopefully explanations won't get lost in the vagueness.
Contains general walkthroughs for - Motion Guides/tweens, various kinds of tweening, symbols in symbols, frame by frame, lipsyncing and lipflaps, tips and tricks and just general advice.
Anyway, I forgot to mention this time last time and I really should have, but there are some more tools that'll help those out there going the frame by frame route, or have to block out things before they draw them which is... pretty much everyone? Or like some guiding lines, anyway. I like to draw these little head circles to help position eyes myself.
So I put this on one layer, and I make a layer above it.
If you click the little colored box there that I've circled, it'll change everything in that layer to what you see here. A kind of colored outline of what was in there. Since there's no transparency with layers in Flash, this is probably as close as you're going to get.
Then just go to the top layer you marked out, and draw away using your guidelines beneath. :B This can also go for basic motion, anything like that. The color guides like this can make things much easier, and also help you pinpoint things on the stage if you lose them, or what piece you're workig on, or any number of things. It's a very useful little feature.
Although, make sure to delete your guide layer when you're done. If you mark a layer as invisible in Flash, it will still show up in your exported movie. So delete them once they do their job.
A good idea is to lock your guide layer. The eraser in Flash is HARDCORE and will erase on every single layer it can, unless it's a symbol or that layer is locked. So lock layers that you don't want erased (if they're drawn on the stage, anyway).
This way, if you mess up your inking lines and erase them, you won't erase your guide layer at the same time.
The eye should be self-explanatory for anyone who works in any kind of photo editing program. It makes a layer visible or invisible. Like I mentioned before, even if a layer is invisible in Flash while you're working on it, it WILL BE VISIBLE WHEN YOU EXPORT/PUBLISH YOUR MOVIE. So when you're finishing up, clean up these little layers.
Anyway, let's get into some sample animations I have lying around here. Let's poke at Mamboleo and Yanni here. He's a symbol, as you can see by his blue border.
You can see the layer he's on up there as well, and that there's only one keyframe. That's because the animation of Yanni breathing is in the Yanni symbol itself. Let's take a look.
Here, I did Edit in Place, thus fading out the background. This is the most useful editing mode, I think.
Anyway, you can see that this Yannisymbol (this one called yannisleep) has two layers. This is partly because, like I mentioned in the last one, Flash randomly deletes lines for no reason sometimes. So when I came back to color this with the fillbucket after finishing the animation, sometimes it'd delete chunks of Yanni's lineart (like his hat, or arm, or leg, IT WAS ALWAYS RANDOM). I got frustrated and copied all the lineart, moved it to a new layer, and locked it so it wouldn't get randomly deleted or messed with because Flash is an inexplicable douche. You'll probably encounter this yourself as you work in Flash. There aren't a lot of things that you can do about it... this is the closest thing to a solution I know of, anyway. And sometimes this still doesn't work. HURRAY FLASH I'LL KILL YOU
Anyway.
Here I marked out the top layer in yellow, so you can see that's the lineart. This can get useful if you have a base thing, then animate, say, an arm moving on a separate layer, because that lowers the chances of Flash screwing up all the lineart for no reason. FLASH IS VERY FRUSTRATING, SO YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO WORK AROUND IT SOMETIMES.
Here I marked out the color in purple. You'll notice though that despite the fact that that color fills Yanni completely (that sounds like a line from a pornfic), it only marks the edges of that color. This can make it easier to see things on colored-in background (for example, a dark starscape - turn it orange and see where the edges are so you know how far to move it for tweening), but it can also be somewhat misleading if you're like I COLORED THIS WTF???
Just keep it in mind.
Anyway, here we have the bit in Mambolawyer where Yanni pauses to scratch his mustache. I used the same base shot of Yanni against the tree. What I did for this was Duplicate the yannisleep symbol, creating a Yannisleep2 symbol, and then I edited Yannisleep2 to become Yanniscratch.
More on duplicating in a bit.
Again, keep this in mind, if you want to change anything or do anything, THERE MUST BE A KEYFRAME. If you have, say, 26 frames on a movie, with a keyframe at frame 1, and you click on frame 20 (the dead grey space i mentioned before) and edit it there, IT WILL EDIT THE FRAME 1 KEYFRAME. YOU MUST MAKE A KEYFRAME FIRST. YOU MUST MAKE A KEYFRAME FOR EVERY CHANGE YOU MAKE.
Here, Yanni was going to go from sleeping to scratching his mustache. Therefore, a keyframe to switch symbols.
Here you can see the inside of the Yanniscratch symbol. This got a bit complicated again because Flash was eating my lines. I also took the base lines for Yanni, erased his arm, and then drew in the arm animation on a new layer. This was mostly an effort to try and stop Flash from eating all my lines. If you have something making minor, small changes (like only a part of them moving, like their arm), try to keep the thing moving and the things that aren't moving on separate layers. It'll save you some headaches later on.
Anyway, let's get to one of the most important little things you can play with. Pop open the properties menu below and click on your symbol. Here I clicked on Larry. Note that menu at the bottom, the one that says Play Once?
There are three settings you can use for a Symbol you put on the stage (and two of these only really apply if it's an animated symbol).
LOOP means the animation will loop over and over again until it runs out of frames. In this example, Larry would raise his hands and shrug over and over again. This is useful for repetitive motions. Yanni sleeping up there was a looped animation, as are many things.
PLAY ONCE means the animation will play out only once, and then stop on the last frame. This might seem like an odd feature, but this can be very versatile. Here, it makes it so Larry raises his arms and shrugs, and then stops with his arms up rather than doing it over and over. If you, say, make something fade out by the last frame and then do Play Once, you can make things disappear without needing to use tweens or blank keyframes. If you're creative, Play Once can do many many things.
SINGLE FRAME should be pretty simple. It just stays on that frame. This might seem to have some limited use, but this is vital to lipsyncing, which I'll get into later.
You see that little window next to that menu, the one that says First: and then a number? That's the frame your symbol starts on. Here, I set it to frame two, and Larry's arms have raised slightly.
Controlling what frame your animation starts on, whether it loops or plays once, or if it just stays on that frame, can be very versatile, like I mentioned up above. If you're creative about how to apply these, you can get lots of very cool effects. I'll bring up a few as we go along.
Also keep in mind that with every keyframe, you can change the setting of your symbol. So I have a symbol set to loop, then go down twenty frames, make a new keyframe, and set it to play once, then, say, Larry will shrug four times and then stop. Or if I make a keyframe halfway with a single frame, he'll freeze. Stuff like that. Mix and match these depending on what you're doing.
MORE ABOUT TWEENS
As you can see here, you can have many tweens in sequence. I used this to make the sign swing back and forth before settling. Once you have a tween like this set up, you can actually click and drag the keyframes at the beginning or end to alter the length. For example, if I wanted a long slow swing, I could click and drag the last keyframe down five frames, making it longer. Flash will automatically compensate by adding more animation in. Likewise the other way around, Flash will cut it shorter.
There is something here that you definitely want to avoid though. I'll get to it in a second.
Here, I positioned the sign swung up, and tweened it from the previous position. Sign swinging! Basic tweening, just all in a row.
AGAIN, KEEP IN MIND YOU CAN ONLY TWEEN ONE SYMBOL ON A LAYER AT A TIME.
Now as I mentioned, there's something you want to watch out for if you have lots of tweens one after the other. I read an explanation for this once, but I can't remember it exactly.
Can you tell the difference in these tweened four layers? Two of them have a line between the arrow and their final frame, and two don't.
YOU ALWAYS WANT A LINE BETWEEN THE ARROW AND YOUR FINAL FRAME. Layer 20 and Layer 37? WRONG. YOU DO NOT WANT THIS. It can cause all sorts of weird problems along the way, especially for basic things like swapping or duplicating symbols, and believe me you just don't want to deal with it.
The best way I've found to avoid this is to do tweens like I showed you, from the properties menu at the bottom of the screem. ALWAYS DO TWEENS FROM THE PROPERTIES MENU. That seems to help avoid this. Otherwise, just be careful about your end frames and the like. Hopefully this won't happen to you. If it does, it's not the end of the world. Just make a new frame above that one, and continue animating from that one instead of the messed up one.
Anyway, let's talk some more about Swapping and Duplicating! These two functions are totally vital and I use them a lot. Let's use Gumshoedaisy here as my example.
Since Gumshoedaisy isn't going to move anywhere around the stage, I put multiple symbols of him all next to each other on the same layer, since I wasn't going to tween anything and therefore who cares how many symbols are in one place. All the animation of him bobbing up and down is in the Gumshoedaisy symbol. No problem.
Selecting a single Gumshoedaisy here. Note the name of the symbol - GUMSHOEDAISY and it's set to loop. Exactly what I want, Gumshoedaisy bobbing up and down until I tell him to stop.
Here, notice that I've moved to the next keyframe, and the symbol's name has changed. It's now Gumshoedaisypal. That's because this is A DUPLICATE SYMBOL I made of Gumshoedaisy, namely one that just stands there and goes "hey pal".
And the best way to switch a symbol that does one thing with a symbol that does another (i.e. Gumshoedaisy bobbing up and down vs. Gumshoedaisy going "hey pal") is to use Swap Symbol.
Swap Symbol does just that. It switches out your symbol with another in your library, and it keeps the placement of it (usually... you might have to tweak this a bit depending on what you're doing.) It also keeps the settings like Loop or Play Once I think, so keep an eye on those if you want it to only play once or whatever.
Here you can see previews of your symbols, to help you tell which one you want to swap, and choose which one is swapped out for what.
The other key thing here is Duplicate Symbol. This, combined with Swap Symbol, can be very helpful in keeping things consistent.
Like it's name implies, Duplicating a Symbol makes an exact copy of that Symbol in every way. For an example of how I put this to use...
I make the Gumshoedaisy bobbing animation, and laugh stupidly at it for a while. Then I want to add him pausing and going "hey pal".
I duplicate the Gumshoedaisy symbol, creating Gumshoedaisypal. Exact copy of the original in every way... except I go into Gumshoedaisypal, and edit it so he pauses and says "hey pal".
I then go to when I want him to stop in the timeline, make a keyframe, and swap GUMSHOEDAISY with GUMSHOEDAISYPAL. Voila, Gumshoedaisy doesn't move or change around the stage at all, just goes hey pal, and then I make a new keyframe and swap Gumshoedaisypal back with Gumshoedaisy, setting him to dancing again.
No problem! Duplicate and Swap can be very useful, especially for Frame by Frame because it helps keep things consistent between animations.
HOWEVER
There are a few pitfalls here you must be careful of. If you're just observant, this probably won't be a problem, but I've screwed this up a few times myself, so I want to point this out.
Sometimes, when you duplicate a symbol, that symbol on the stage will AUTOMATICALLY be swapped for the duplicate.
For example - I make a keyframe and duplicate Gumshoedaisy. Unbeknownst to me, the symbol in that keyframe on the mainstrage now? Is Gumshoedaisy2. The copy.
This kind of confusion can result in you editing the Original rather than your Duplicate, or just losing track of what's going where. ALWAYS KEEP TRACK OF WHAT SYMBOL YOU'RE EDITING, AND WHAT SYMBOL IS ON THE STAGE. WATCH THE SYMBOL NAMES. You don't want to edit the original and then go to the copy and screw up all the previous animation that involved the original, do you? No, you do not. JUST BE OBSERVANT AND YOU PROBABLY WON'T HAVE ANY PROBLEMS.
I duplicate symbols A LOT depending on what I'm doing.
Anyway, if you want to see what your movie actually will look like outside of Flash, then go here to Test Movie. This will show you how it will run, how your animation looks, if your buttons work, and more importantly, it will show you your movie clips.
For bizarre reasons, MOVIE CLIPS DO NOT ANIMATE IN FLASH ITSELF. You will only see your movie clips animation WHEN YOU TEST YOUR MOVIE. For example, when I was working on the Starcon2 Western Show? ZEX's head feelers didn't move. They only moved when I went and tested the movie.
Don't think that your movie clip animation is broken or anything, it's just something that only shows up when you test movie. Flash is a weird program.
I'll go more into publishing and stuff when we get into postproduction buttons and whatever.
Alright, let's do some simple tweening to show the things you can do with a tween. There are a few out there, and if you experiment or combine them in creative ways, you can get some interesting effects.
Here, I set up a keyframe here, and a keyframe there. Motion between two points, no problem.
Now, let's say you want to make this ugly circle huge for some reason. What you want is the Transform menu. Flash has a bunch of menus all over the place, but I really usually just stick with Transform/Color Mixer myself.
There, you see Transform over there in the upper right? You can make things bigger or smaller, no problem. This can help if you, say, drew a giant hand and want to fix it. You can also skew stuff but I never mess with that generally.
But here, I made this end frame all big.
A quick tween, and now the ugly circle grows big AND moves from one side of the screen to the other. As long as they aren't in conflict with each other, you can tween a few effects on something at a time. AS LONG AS IT'S THE ONLY THING ON THAT LAYER.
There at the bottom, you can see rotate CW or CCW. This can be fun to play with. If you set this, the thing will rotate however many times you set from the start point to the end point. I used this for Giegue at the end of the 8 Melodies flash, and Raiden somersaulting into the stairs in Things Can Only Get Gayer.
IF YOU WANNA MAKE THINGS SPIN WELL HERE YOU GO
So now this circle moves across the stage, gets bigger, and spins.
On the right side of your properties menu is Color. This is where you can fiddle with a Symbol's color without having to poke into Shape tweens. You can change all sorts of things about it, but the important one I usually use is Alpha. Alpha is transparency, and this is the key to having things fade in and out.
Here, I set the last frame as Alpha 0%, making it invisible. If you set the first frame as Alpha 0% and the last as Alpha 100%, you can make things fade in as well. Or just fade to whatever transparency you want, up to you.
You can use this to set any symbols transparency, regardless of whether or not they're tweening. Goodman, for example, in Mambolawyer and Gregory Edgeworth are both ghosts, but in their symbols they're just as drawn in as anyone else. When I put them on the stage, I set their transparency to like... 50%, making them ghosty and seethrough.
And now the circle moves across the stage, gets bigger, spins, and disappears. All at once! This is the POWER OF TWEEEENS. Combine these effects in creative ways and you can get some neat stuff.
Alright, let's do something a bit more complicated. If there's a keyframe you don't need or want to get rid of, use clear keyframe.
Let's do one of my most hated tweens, the Motion Guided tween. I always have trouble with these for some stupid reason, but they give you a lot more flexibility. Doing these correctly is always a hit or miss for me, but so far I've had some good luck. Just make sure you do EACH STEP IN ORDER.
Anyway, click this button.
You see that new fancy layer up there, the one that indented the Layer 1? That's your Guide Layer. This is where you'll draw the line of motion that you want your circle to follow. These layers are invisible when you publish/export your movie, so don't worry about them.
Take the PENCIL TOOL (i think the pencil tool is the only one that works) and draw ON THE GUIDE LAYER whatever line you want your circle to follow. Apparently my circle is going to wobble all over the stage. FINE BY ME.
Here's where I always have problems for some reason. Click the select arrow up there, the black one, and MAKE SURE THAT SNAP TO OBJECTS IS ON. The little magnet down there I circled. MAKE SURE IT'S ON.
Now, what you want to do is drag your symbol and match up that circle in the center to the start of your line. YOU WANT YOUR SYMBOL TO SNAP TO THE END OF THE GUIDE LINE. If it doesn't snap to it, you screwed up. Try again. MAKE SURE IT SNAPS TO IT. You should be able to tell. AND MAKE SURE IT'S THE CENTER DOT THINGY.
That center dot thing is... I forget the word for it? The point of... reference? Anyway, the weird thing about that center dot thingy is that you can actually click and drag it out of the center and put it anywhere you want. So you could have that dot be way off in the upper right of your symbol, and then snap that circle to the guide line, and it'll still animate it along that motion path, just from a distance. If you mix and match a bunch of weird reference points (you can have multiple layers following the same Guide Layer) you can do stuff like... leaves blowing in the wind from all sorts of directions.
Or so I've heard in theory, I've never tried it.
Okay, the symbol snapped to it, and now the first frame of my animation is set at the beginning of my line. Time to make the end frame.
Thankfully, this time around they both snapped without a problem.
Set it to tween and...
Voila! Your symbol follows the path you marked out! You can imagine that this has many uses. You can also combine it with the tweens I mentioned above, so you can make things rotate, grow bigger, change color, fade in or out, or any number of things.
I use this rarely because I always botch it somehow. THIS MAY NOT SOUND HARD BUT BELIEVE ME, IT'S EASY TO SCREW UP. I did do it successfully a few times, notably the Flagship at the beginning of Starcon2 Western Show, Turnerscorpion jumping on April May's face in Mambolawyer, and the aforementioned Raiden somersaulting into the stairs.
The Guide Layer won't show up when you export your movie, like I said. But that pencil line can look awfully ugly. You can hide the layer though, and just see the fruits of your labor that way.
ANYWAY let's take a peek at some tweened animation! I mentioned before that tween animation can take lots of layers and planning. Here's an example. In Move Your Dead Bones, there are a billion layers for everything, and almost all the animation is done right on the stage, rather than in symbols. Here, you can see a few layers of Zar's movement here.
Another fun feature is that if you click this eye here, you can hide or show all layers, and ditto for the lock and color things. Can be useful for when you want to focus on one or two layers.
One layer.
One layer.
One layer.
You see how complicated this can get? If you're working with tweens, MAKE SURE you keep track of what you're doing and are prepared to deal with many layers, inside a symbol or out.
ANYWAY LET'S HIT LIPSYNCING!
I just learned this myself recently. :B Let's use Talana as an example. Here, notice that her head is one symbol, and notice how many keyframes are on that layer. Lots of keyframes!
Looking inside the Talanahead symbol, there are a few layers here. One was her eyes, so she'd blink randomly, and one was the rest of her face.
One is her mouth. This is the important one.
And here we are in the Mouth symbol. This isn't Talana's mouth, it's a generic one that can really go to any person. It has seven frames that cover the basic positions of the mouth when speaking.
You'll need a closed mouth. This particular mouth here is a copy (a duplicate! See?) of the original, which was smiling. You might have to edit these to match with whatever mood your character's in, etc.
FFFFFFFFFFFF
hahaha with Japanese, you don't use this one very often.
Slightly open, can be used for various sounds.
Wide, open vowel sounds.
LLLLLLLLLLL
And also N kind of.
Sssssssss
Oooooo
These aren't hard and fast rules for what these shapes represent. What you want is to try and match the sounds you hear as closely as possible. Say the words yourself, notice how your mouth moves, mimic. You can also combine some for different sounds that aren't represented readily here, like the FFFF and the wide mouth for a FAAA sound, or add the SS and etc etc.
So once you have these seven shapes, you should be mostly set. You can interpret them differently depending on the person who's speaking. Like the Umgah, for example, had a wobbly goofy looking mouth with a few teeth here and there. It's the basic mouth positions that matter.
Here, the head symbol is seven frames long, the exact same amount as the mouth symbol. Nothing else moves except the mouth.
So now let's pull back and go back to our stage. How do we use this mouth we've set up now?
The key is Single Frame and the ability to choose what frame your Symbol is on. Because the Head symbol is seven frames, and the Mouth symbol is seven frames, that means that the Head/Mouth symbols share the same frames, pretty much. Meaning I can set a frame for the head, and have it reflect in the mouth. Here, you see that Talana is on frame 1, which for the mouth symbol is the closed mouth.
Make a new keyframe, and change the frame to frame 3, the slightly open mouth. Her face stays the same, but her mouth moves.
Next frame, set it to frame 4, the wide open mouth as Talana goes HEY.
And make keyframes for each time her mouth would move. Here, for the KOO bit in Koopa. What this means is that you're going to be listening very carefully to the music and speech, then making a keyframe for each different motion, and changing the frame on each one. This is a bit tedious, but it actually goes by much faster than you'd think. The timing is actually more tricky than anything, but I can't really help you with that.
Now, you might be wondering "Why didn't you just put the mouth on a separate layer? Why put it in the head symbol? That seemed pointless."
Well the key to this is that I wanted to tween Talana's head at one point, so she'd tilt it slightly. If her head and her mouth are on separate layers, that means that they wouldn't move together, and trying to get them to move together on separate layers is frustrating and looks awkward. Move Your Dead Bones suffers from this, and Larry going MAMBO MAMBOLE at the beginning of Mambolawyer.
HOWEVER
If Talana's head has the mouth symbol in it, then I can tween her head all over the place, and her mouth will always stay in place. BINGO. This also even allows me to keep her mouth moving if her head was tweening. How?
You know the blue frames that happen after you tween? You can insert keyframes into those, and it will still keep the general motion. So what you do is that you, say, tween Talana's head to tilt over ten frames. So those ten frames are blue with an arrow. Then you find where her mouth needs to change shape within those blue frames, make a keyframe, and change the frame to frame 5 or 3 or whatever. Repeat as necessary.
Of course, the restriction on this is that Talana's head has to be able to be a SINGLE FRAME most of the time. This is why her hair and the rest of her body, and her eyes (her eyes were a movie clip, therefore unaffected by anything else going on) are all separate, so they could move while her face stayed the same. Except for her mouth.
AND THERE YOU HAVE IT.
Her head tilts, but her mouth stays in just the same place. This is an accomplishment for me, after all the times I've botched this in other movies. YES I HAVE A METHOD NOW.
Anyway, let's go into some more examples of frame by frame combined with tweening. Here, I drew Jack and Will directly on the stage. Frame by frame, as you can see by the keyframes up there, I drew Jack dipping Will.
However here, you can see by the blue outline, they're a symbol, so I can tween them to move slightly to one side while the animation in the symbol plays out.
Here's the symbol of Jack and Will spinning. This is set to loop, so as long as there's time, they'll spin. I then tweened this to move slightly to one side, so it looks like Jack spins Will around the dancefloor a little bit.
More frame by frame here, for like 12 or 14 before going back into a tweened symbol.
And here, once they reached the last frame of the frame by frame I wanted, I took that frame, made it a symbol, and tweened it here to move slightly.
Another interesting quirk about Flash - You know how when you click a layer, it selects everything? This can be annoying if you have a background that keeps jumping in the way when you're trying to select something.
However, if you lock a layer, that means that nothing can touch or alter it anymore, but also that you can't select it. Thus meaning you don't have to worry about erasing, moving, or screwing it up while you're trying to do other things. Good for backgrounds that you don't want to interact with while you're working on other things.
Another example of messing with tweens - The puffs of pink smoke for Max Galactica's entrance. I just drew a puff of pink, then shape tweened it to fade out using alpha transparency. And I might have added some effect in there like Break Apart or something from the menus but whatever. Then I covered Max with a bunch of these symbols and set them all to play once, so he'd poof in and then his pink smoke would disappear and not come back. Simple!
Probably the most complicated example of layering I've got - the Mambolawyer dancers. I started with Lana as my base, so let's look at her. You'll notice there's only one keyframe on the timeline (well mostly, the other one there was to adjust timing by skipping a frame using the frame select)... all of Lana's animation is contained in her symbol, instead of being drawn on the stage.
But even inside Lana, there are still too few keyframes. I broke Lana's dancing animation into pieces here, so inside the Lanasymbol are MORE symbols, and those are the ones that include her dancing. I think I did it this way because my computer was lagging or something? Or it helped make timing easier, I dunno. Anyway.
Here, you can see that the Lanadance symbol is actually made up of other, smaller symbols. Like this one.
And here we finally find the animation itself! Flash's random line eating got VERY frustrating around this part, you have no idea. Each keyframe up there is a frame of animation.
And Lana's dance animation in total is 180 frames long. :O However a lot of the motion was looped at points. And then I had to redraw this animation three more times for Maggey, Angel, and the Judge. UGH.
Again, this is where duplicate symbols come in handy, although I'd be careful duplicating a symbol that has a bunch of symbols in it. JUST WATCH WHAT YOU'RE DOING BASICALLY.
And that was all I could think of for this round. Oof. HOPE SOME OF THIS HELPS, ANYWAY.
ECO_MONO HELPFULLY RECORDED IT! So go check it out. :B
Checking out DoD as usual, and this Actraiser remix jumped out at me. I love Actraiser, it was totally a huge thing for me as a kid. I loved the building aspect of it, just raising little towns and helping people. I LOVE SIM GAMES. I was not so good at the sidescrolling part. But I also especially loved the music (oh BIG SURPRISE I hear out there).
But anyway, this sucker is ELEVEN MINUTES LONG but it really weaves together a lot of the themes from the game in a really awesome way. I especially love near the end how it brings in the Kasandora theme after that one guy dies (GOD I love that theme it gives me goosebumps everytime) and the theme when you're in your sky palace it's like ♥
Anyway, continuing with my rambly little Flash tutorial. I'm assuming you read the first part and have a basic understanding of what symbols and tweening are, although I'm going to get into more detail here. THIS TIME I'M ALSO GOING TO INCLUDE CONCRETE EXAMPLES FROM MY OWN MOVIES OF WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT so hopefully explanations won't get lost in the vagueness.
Contains general walkthroughs for - Motion Guides/tweens, various kinds of tweening, symbols in symbols, frame by frame, lipsyncing and lipflaps, tips and tricks and just general advice.
Anyway, I forgot to mention this time last time and I really should have, but there are some more tools that'll help those out there going the frame by frame route, or have to block out things before they draw them which is... pretty much everyone? Or like some guiding lines, anyway. I like to draw these little head circles to help position eyes myself.
So I put this on one layer, and I make a layer above it.
If you click the little colored box there that I've circled, it'll change everything in that layer to what you see here. A kind of colored outline of what was in there. Since there's no transparency with layers in Flash, this is probably as close as you're going to get.
Then just go to the top layer you marked out, and draw away using your guidelines beneath. :B This can also go for basic motion, anything like that. The color guides like this can make things much easier, and also help you pinpoint things on the stage if you lose them, or what piece you're workig on, or any number of things. It's a very useful little feature.
Although, make sure to delete your guide layer when you're done. If you mark a layer as invisible in Flash, it will still show up in your exported movie. So delete them once they do their job.
A good idea is to lock your guide layer. The eraser in Flash is HARDCORE and will erase on every single layer it can, unless it's a symbol or that layer is locked. So lock layers that you don't want erased (if they're drawn on the stage, anyway).
This way, if you mess up your inking lines and erase them, you won't erase your guide layer at the same time.
The eye should be self-explanatory for anyone who works in any kind of photo editing program. It makes a layer visible or invisible. Like I mentioned before, even if a layer is invisible in Flash while you're working on it, it WILL BE VISIBLE WHEN YOU EXPORT/PUBLISH YOUR MOVIE. So when you're finishing up, clean up these little layers.
Anyway, let's get into some sample animations I have lying around here. Let's poke at Mamboleo and Yanni here. He's a symbol, as you can see by his blue border.
You can see the layer he's on up there as well, and that there's only one keyframe. That's because the animation of Yanni breathing is in the Yanni symbol itself. Let's take a look.
Here, I did Edit in Place, thus fading out the background. This is the most useful editing mode, I think.
Anyway, you can see that this Yannisymbol (this one called yannisleep) has two layers. This is partly because, like I mentioned in the last one, Flash randomly deletes lines for no reason sometimes. So when I came back to color this with the fillbucket after finishing the animation, sometimes it'd delete chunks of Yanni's lineart (like his hat, or arm, or leg, IT WAS ALWAYS RANDOM). I got frustrated and copied all the lineart, moved it to a new layer, and locked it so it wouldn't get randomly deleted or messed with because Flash is an inexplicable douche. You'll probably encounter this yourself as you work in Flash. There aren't a lot of things that you can do about it... this is the closest thing to a solution I know of, anyway. And sometimes this still doesn't work. HURRAY FLASH I'LL KILL YOU
Anyway.
Here I marked out the top layer in yellow, so you can see that's the lineart. This can get useful if you have a base thing, then animate, say, an arm moving on a separate layer, because that lowers the chances of Flash screwing up all the lineart for no reason. FLASH IS VERY FRUSTRATING, SO YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO WORK AROUND IT SOMETIMES.
Here I marked out the color in purple. You'll notice though that despite the fact that that color fills Yanni completely (that sounds like a line from a pornfic), it only marks the edges of that color. This can make it easier to see things on colored-in background (for example, a dark starscape - turn it orange and see where the edges are so you know how far to move it for tweening), but it can also be somewhat misleading if you're like I COLORED THIS WTF???
Just keep it in mind.
Anyway, here we have the bit in Mambolawyer where Yanni pauses to scratch his mustache. I used the same base shot of Yanni against the tree. What I did for this was Duplicate the yannisleep symbol, creating a Yannisleep2 symbol, and then I edited Yannisleep2 to become Yanniscratch.
More on duplicating in a bit.
Again, keep this in mind, if you want to change anything or do anything, THERE MUST BE A KEYFRAME. If you have, say, 26 frames on a movie, with a keyframe at frame 1, and you click on frame 20 (the dead grey space i mentioned before) and edit it there, IT WILL EDIT THE FRAME 1 KEYFRAME. YOU MUST MAKE A KEYFRAME FIRST. YOU MUST MAKE A KEYFRAME FOR EVERY CHANGE YOU MAKE.
Here, Yanni was going to go from sleeping to scratching his mustache. Therefore, a keyframe to switch symbols.
Here you can see the inside of the Yanniscratch symbol. This got a bit complicated again because Flash was eating my lines. I also took the base lines for Yanni, erased his arm, and then drew in the arm animation on a new layer. This was mostly an effort to try and stop Flash from eating all my lines. If you have something making minor, small changes (like only a part of them moving, like their arm), try to keep the thing moving and the things that aren't moving on separate layers. It'll save you some headaches later on.
Anyway, let's get to one of the most important little things you can play with. Pop open the properties menu below and click on your symbol. Here I clicked on Larry. Note that menu at the bottom, the one that says Play Once?
There are three settings you can use for a Symbol you put on the stage (and two of these only really apply if it's an animated symbol).
LOOP means the animation will loop over and over again until it runs out of frames. In this example, Larry would raise his hands and shrug over and over again. This is useful for repetitive motions. Yanni sleeping up there was a looped animation, as are many things.
PLAY ONCE means the animation will play out only once, and then stop on the last frame. This might seem like an odd feature, but this can be very versatile. Here, it makes it so Larry raises his arms and shrugs, and then stops with his arms up rather than doing it over and over. If you, say, make something fade out by the last frame and then do Play Once, you can make things disappear without needing to use tweens or blank keyframes. If you're creative, Play Once can do many many things.
SINGLE FRAME should be pretty simple. It just stays on that frame. This might seem to have some limited use, but this is vital to lipsyncing, which I'll get into later.
You see that little window next to that menu, the one that says First: and then a number? That's the frame your symbol starts on. Here, I set it to frame two, and Larry's arms have raised slightly.
Controlling what frame your animation starts on, whether it loops or plays once, or if it just stays on that frame, can be very versatile, like I mentioned up above. If you're creative about how to apply these, you can get lots of very cool effects. I'll bring up a few as we go along.
Also keep in mind that with every keyframe, you can change the setting of your symbol. So I have a symbol set to loop, then go down twenty frames, make a new keyframe, and set it to play once, then, say, Larry will shrug four times and then stop. Or if I make a keyframe halfway with a single frame, he'll freeze. Stuff like that. Mix and match these depending on what you're doing.
MORE ABOUT TWEENS
As you can see here, you can have many tweens in sequence. I used this to make the sign swing back and forth before settling. Once you have a tween like this set up, you can actually click and drag the keyframes at the beginning or end to alter the length. For example, if I wanted a long slow swing, I could click and drag the last keyframe down five frames, making it longer. Flash will automatically compensate by adding more animation in. Likewise the other way around, Flash will cut it shorter.
There is something here that you definitely want to avoid though. I'll get to it in a second.
Here, I positioned the sign swung up, and tweened it from the previous position. Sign swinging! Basic tweening, just all in a row.
AGAIN, KEEP IN MIND YOU CAN ONLY TWEEN ONE SYMBOL ON A LAYER AT A TIME.
Now as I mentioned, there's something you want to watch out for if you have lots of tweens one after the other. I read an explanation for this once, but I can't remember it exactly.
Can you tell the difference in these tweened four layers? Two of them have a line between the arrow and their final frame, and two don't.
YOU ALWAYS WANT A LINE BETWEEN THE ARROW AND YOUR FINAL FRAME. Layer 20 and Layer 37? WRONG. YOU DO NOT WANT THIS. It can cause all sorts of weird problems along the way, especially for basic things like swapping or duplicating symbols, and believe me you just don't want to deal with it.
The best way I've found to avoid this is to do tweens like I showed you, from the properties menu at the bottom of the screem. ALWAYS DO TWEENS FROM THE PROPERTIES MENU. That seems to help avoid this. Otherwise, just be careful about your end frames and the like. Hopefully this won't happen to you. If it does, it's not the end of the world. Just make a new frame above that one, and continue animating from that one instead of the messed up one.
Anyway, let's talk some more about Swapping and Duplicating! These two functions are totally vital and I use them a lot. Let's use Gumshoedaisy here as my example.
Since Gumshoedaisy isn't going to move anywhere around the stage, I put multiple symbols of him all next to each other on the same layer, since I wasn't going to tween anything and therefore who cares how many symbols are in one place. All the animation of him bobbing up and down is in the Gumshoedaisy symbol. No problem.
Selecting a single Gumshoedaisy here. Note the name of the symbol - GUMSHOEDAISY and it's set to loop. Exactly what I want, Gumshoedaisy bobbing up and down until I tell him to stop.
Here, notice that I've moved to the next keyframe, and the symbol's name has changed. It's now Gumshoedaisypal. That's because this is A DUPLICATE SYMBOL I made of Gumshoedaisy, namely one that just stands there and goes "hey pal".
And the best way to switch a symbol that does one thing with a symbol that does another (i.e. Gumshoedaisy bobbing up and down vs. Gumshoedaisy going "hey pal") is to use Swap Symbol.
Swap Symbol does just that. It switches out your symbol with another in your library, and it keeps the placement of it (usually... you might have to tweak this a bit depending on what you're doing.) It also keeps the settings like Loop or Play Once I think, so keep an eye on those if you want it to only play once or whatever.
Here you can see previews of your symbols, to help you tell which one you want to swap, and choose which one is swapped out for what.
The other key thing here is Duplicate Symbol. This, combined with Swap Symbol, can be very helpful in keeping things consistent.
Like it's name implies, Duplicating a Symbol makes an exact copy of that Symbol in every way. For an example of how I put this to use...
I make the Gumshoedaisy bobbing animation, and laugh stupidly at it for a while. Then I want to add him pausing and going "hey pal".
I duplicate the Gumshoedaisy symbol, creating Gumshoedaisypal. Exact copy of the original in every way... except I go into Gumshoedaisypal, and edit it so he pauses and says "hey pal".
I then go to when I want him to stop in the timeline, make a keyframe, and swap GUMSHOEDAISY with GUMSHOEDAISYPAL. Voila, Gumshoedaisy doesn't move or change around the stage at all, just goes hey pal, and then I make a new keyframe and swap Gumshoedaisypal back with Gumshoedaisy, setting him to dancing again.
No problem! Duplicate and Swap can be very useful, especially for Frame by Frame because it helps keep things consistent between animations.
HOWEVER
There are a few pitfalls here you must be careful of. If you're just observant, this probably won't be a problem, but I've screwed this up a few times myself, so I want to point this out.
Sometimes, when you duplicate a symbol, that symbol on the stage will AUTOMATICALLY be swapped for the duplicate.
For example - I make a keyframe and duplicate Gumshoedaisy. Unbeknownst to me, the symbol in that keyframe on the mainstrage now? Is Gumshoedaisy2. The copy.
This kind of confusion can result in you editing the Original rather than your Duplicate, or just losing track of what's going where. ALWAYS KEEP TRACK OF WHAT SYMBOL YOU'RE EDITING, AND WHAT SYMBOL IS ON THE STAGE. WATCH THE SYMBOL NAMES. You don't want to edit the original and then go to the copy and screw up all the previous animation that involved the original, do you? No, you do not. JUST BE OBSERVANT AND YOU PROBABLY WON'T HAVE ANY PROBLEMS.
I duplicate symbols A LOT depending on what I'm doing.
Anyway, if you want to see what your movie actually will look like outside of Flash, then go here to Test Movie. This will show you how it will run, how your animation looks, if your buttons work, and more importantly, it will show you your movie clips.
For bizarre reasons, MOVIE CLIPS DO NOT ANIMATE IN FLASH ITSELF. You will only see your movie clips animation WHEN YOU TEST YOUR MOVIE. For example, when I was working on the Starcon2 Western Show? ZEX's head feelers didn't move. They only moved when I went and tested the movie.
Don't think that your movie clip animation is broken or anything, it's just something that only shows up when you test movie. Flash is a weird program.
I'll go more into publishing and stuff when we get into postproduction buttons and whatever.
Alright, let's do some simple tweening to show the things you can do with a tween. There are a few out there, and if you experiment or combine them in creative ways, you can get some interesting effects.
Here, I set up a keyframe here, and a keyframe there. Motion between two points, no problem.
Now, let's say you want to make this ugly circle huge for some reason. What you want is the Transform menu. Flash has a bunch of menus all over the place, but I really usually just stick with Transform/Color Mixer myself.
There, you see Transform over there in the upper right? You can make things bigger or smaller, no problem. This can help if you, say, drew a giant hand and want to fix it. You can also skew stuff but I never mess with that generally.
But here, I made this end frame all big.
A quick tween, and now the ugly circle grows big AND moves from one side of the screen to the other. As long as they aren't in conflict with each other, you can tween a few effects on something at a time. AS LONG AS IT'S THE ONLY THING ON THAT LAYER.
There at the bottom, you can see rotate CW or CCW. This can be fun to play with. If you set this, the thing will rotate however many times you set from the start point to the end point. I used this for Giegue at the end of the 8 Melodies flash, and Raiden somersaulting into the stairs in Things Can Only Get Gayer.
IF YOU WANNA MAKE THINGS SPIN WELL HERE YOU GO
So now this circle moves across the stage, gets bigger, and spins.
On the right side of your properties menu is Color. This is where you can fiddle with a Symbol's color without having to poke into Shape tweens. You can change all sorts of things about it, but the important one I usually use is Alpha. Alpha is transparency, and this is the key to having things fade in and out.
Here, I set the last frame as Alpha 0%, making it invisible. If you set the first frame as Alpha 0% and the last as Alpha 100%, you can make things fade in as well. Or just fade to whatever transparency you want, up to you.
You can use this to set any symbols transparency, regardless of whether or not they're tweening. Goodman, for example, in Mambolawyer and Gregory Edgeworth are both ghosts, but in their symbols they're just as drawn in as anyone else. When I put them on the stage, I set their transparency to like... 50%, making them ghosty and seethrough.
And now the circle moves across the stage, gets bigger, spins, and disappears. All at once! This is the POWER OF TWEEEENS. Combine these effects in creative ways and you can get some neat stuff.
Alright, let's do something a bit more complicated. If there's a keyframe you don't need or want to get rid of, use clear keyframe.
Let's do one of my most hated tweens, the Motion Guided tween. I always have trouble with these for some stupid reason, but they give you a lot more flexibility. Doing these correctly is always a hit or miss for me, but so far I've had some good luck. Just make sure you do EACH STEP IN ORDER.
Anyway, click this button.
You see that new fancy layer up there, the one that indented the Layer 1? That's your Guide Layer. This is where you'll draw the line of motion that you want your circle to follow. These layers are invisible when you publish/export your movie, so don't worry about them.
Take the PENCIL TOOL (i think the pencil tool is the only one that works) and draw ON THE GUIDE LAYER whatever line you want your circle to follow. Apparently my circle is going to wobble all over the stage. FINE BY ME.
Here's where I always have problems for some reason. Click the select arrow up there, the black one, and MAKE SURE THAT SNAP TO OBJECTS IS ON. The little magnet down there I circled. MAKE SURE IT'S ON.
Now, what you want to do is drag your symbol and match up that circle in the center to the start of your line. YOU WANT YOUR SYMBOL TO SNAP TO THE END OF THE GUIDE LINE. If it doesn't snap to it, you screwed up. Try again. MAKE SURE IT SNAPS TO IT. You should be able to tell. AND MAKE SURE IT'S THE CENTER DOT THINGY.
That center dot thing is... I forget the word for it? The point of... reference? Anyway, the weird thing about that center dot thingy is that you can actually click and drag it out of the center and put it anywhere you want. So you could have that dot be way off in the upper right of your symbol, and then snap that circle to the guide line, and it'll still animate it along that motion path, just from a distance. If you mix and match a bunch of weird reference points (you can have multiple layers following the same Guide Layer) you can do stuff like... leaves blowing in the wind from all sorts of directions.
Or so I've heard in theory, I've never tried it.
Okay, the symbol snapped to it, and now the first frame of my animation is set at the beginning of my line. Time to make the end frame.
Thankfully, this time around they both snapped without a problem.
Set it to tween and...
Voila! Your symbol follows the path you marked out! You can imagine that this has many uses. You can also combine it with the tweens I mentioned above, so you can make things rotate, grow bigger, change color, fade in or out, or any number of things.
I use this rarely because I always botch it somehow. THIS MAY NOT SOUND HARD BUT BELIEVE ME, IT'S EASY TO SCREW UP. I did do it successfully a few times, notably the Flagship at the beginning of Starcon2 Western Show, Turnerscorpion jumping on April May's face in Mambolawyer, and the aforementioned Raiden somersaulting into the stairs.
The Guide Layer won't show up when you export your movie, like I said. But that pencil line can look awfully ugly. You can hide the layer though, and just see the fruits of your labor that way.
ANYWAY let's take a peek at some tweened animation! I mentioned before that tween animation can take lots of layers and planning. Here's an example. In Move Your Dead Bones, there are a billion layers for everything, and almost all the animation is done right on the stage, rather than in symbols. Here, you can see a few layers of Zar's movement here.
Another fun feature is that if you click this eye here, you can hide or show all layers, and ditto for the lock and color things. Can be useful for when you want to focus on one or two layers.
One layer.
One layer.
One layer.
You see how complicated this can get? If you're working with tweens, MAKE SURE you keep track of what you're doing and are prepared to deal with many layers, inside a symbol or out.
ANYWAY LET'S HIT LIPSYNCING!
I just learned this myself recently. :B Let's use Talana as an example. Here, notice that her head is one symbol, and notice how many keyframes are on that layer. Lots of keyframes!
Looking inside the Talanahead symbol, there are a few layers here. One was her eyes, so she'd blink randomly, and one was the rest of her face.
One is her mouth. This is the important one.
And here we are in the Mouth symbol. This isn't Talana's mouth, it's a generic one that can really go to any person. It has seven frames that cover the basic positions of the mouth when speaking.
You'll need a closed mouth. This particular mouth here is a copy (a duplicate! See?) of the original, which was smiling. You might have to edit these to match with whatever mood your character's in, etc.
FFFFFFFFFFFF
hahaha with Japanese, you don't use this one very often.
Slightly open, can be used for various sounds.
Wide, open vowel sounds.
LLLLLLLLLLL
And also N kind of.
Sssssssss
Oooooo
These aren't hard and fast rules for what these shapes represent. What you want is to try and match the sounds you hear as closely as possible. Say the words yourself, notice how your mouth moves, mimic. You can also combine some for different sounds that aren't represented readily here, like the FFFF and the wide mouth for a FAAA sound, or add the SS and etc etc.
So once you have these seven shapes, you should be mostly set. You can interpret them differently depending on the person who's speaking. Like the Umgah, for example, had a wobbly goofy looking mouth with a few teeth here and there. It's the basic mouth positions that matter.
Here, the head symbol is seven frames long, the exact same amount as the mouth symbol. Nothing else moves except the mouth.
So now let's pull back and go back to our stage. How do we use this mouth we've set up now?
The key is Single Frame and the ability to choose what frame your Symbol is on. Because the Head symbol is seven frames, and the Mouth symbol is seven frames, that means that the Head/Mouth symbols share the same frames, pretty much. Meaning I can set a frame for the head, and have it reflect in the mouth. Here, you see that Talana is on frame 1, which for the mouth symbol is the closed mouth.
Make a new keyframe, and change the frame to frame 3, the slightly open mouth. Her face stays the same, but her mouth moves.
Next frame, set it to frame 4, the wide open mouth as Talana goes HEY.
And make keyframes for each time her mouth would move. Here, for the KOO bit in Koopa. What this means is that you're going to be listening very carefully to the music and speech, then making a keyframe for each different motion, and changing the frame on each one. This is a bit tedious, but it actually goes by much faster than you'd think. The timing is actually more tricky than anything, but I can't really help you with that.
Now, you might be wondering "Why didn't you just put the mouth on a separate layer? Why put it in the head symbol? That seemed pointless."
Well the key to this is that I wanted to tween Talana's head at one point, so she'd tilt it slightly. If her head and her mouth are on separate layers, that means that they wouldn't move together, and trying to get them to move together on separate layers is frustrating and looks awkward. Move Your Dead Bones suffers from this, and Larry going MAMBO MAMBOLE at the beginning of Mambolawyer.
HOWEVER
If Talana's head has the mouth symbol in it, then I can tween her head all over the place, and her mouth will always stay in place. BINGO. This also even allows me to keep her mouth moving if her head was tweening. How?
You know the blue frames that happen after you tween? You can insert keyframes into those, and it will still keep the general motion. So what you do is that you, say, tween Talana's head to tilt over ten frames. So those ten frames are blue with an arrow. Then you find where her mouth needs to change shape within those blue frames, make a keyframe, and change the frame to frame 5 or 3 or whatever. Repeat as necessary.
Of course, the restriction on this is that Talana's head has to be able to be a SINGLE FRAME most of the time. This is why her hair and the rest of her body, and her eyes (her eyes were a movie clip, therefore unaffected by anything else going on) are all separate, so they could move while her face stayed the same. Except for her mouth.
AND THERE YOU HAVE IT.
Her head tilts, but her mouth stays in just the same place. This is an accomplishment for me, after all the times I've botched this in other movies. YES I HAVE A METHOD NOW.
Anyway, let's go into some more examples of frame by frame combined with tweening. Here, I drew Jack and Will directly on the stage. Frame by frame, as you can see by the keyframes up there, I drew Jack dipping Will.
However here, you can see by the blue outline, they're a symbol, so I can tween them to move slightly to one side while the animation in the symbol plays out.
Here's the symbol of Jack and Will spinning. This is set to loop, so as long as there's time, they'll spin. I then tweened this to move slightly to one side, so it looks like Jack spins Will around the dancefloor a little bit.
More frame by frame here, for like 12 or 14 before going back into a tweened symbol.
And here, once they reached the last frame of the frame by frame I wanted, I took that frame, made it a symbol, and tweened it here to move slightly.
Another interesting quirk about Flash - You know how when you click a layer, it selects everything? This can be annoying if you have a background that keeps jumping in the way when you're trying to select something.
However, if you lock a layer, that means that nothing can touch or alter it anymore, but also that you can't select it. Thus meaning you don't have to worry about erasing, moving, or screwing it up while you're trying to do other things. Good for backgrounds that you don't want to interact with while you're working on other things.
Another example of messing with tweens - The puffs of pink smoke for Max Galactica's entrance. I just drew a puff of pink, then shape tweened it to fade out using alpha transparency. And I might have added some effect in there like Break Apart or something from the menus but whatever. Then I covered Max with a bunch of these symbols and set them all to play once, so he'd poof in and then his pink smoke would disappear and not come back. Simple!
Probably the most complicated example of layering I've got - the Mambolawyer dancers. I started with Lana as my base, so let's look at her. You'll notice there's only one keyframe on the timeline (well mostly, the other one there was to adjust timing by skipping a frame using the frame select)... all of Lana's animation is contained in her symbol, instead of being drawn on the stage.
But even inside Lana, there are still too few keyframes. I broke Lana's dancing animation into pieces here, so inside the Lanasymbol are MORE symbols, and those are the ones that include her dancing. I think I did it this way because my computer was lagging or something? Or it helped make timing easier, I dunno. Anyway.
Here, you can see that the Lanadance symbol is actually made up of other, smaller symbols. Like this one.
And here we finally find the animation itself! Flash's random line eating got VERY frustrating around this part, you have no idea. Each keyframe up there is a frame of animation.
And Lana's dance animation in total is 180 frames long. :O However a lot of the motion was looped at points. And then I had to redraw this animation three more times for Maggey, Angel, and the Judge. UGH.
Again, this is where duplicate symbols come in handy, although I'd be careful duplicating a symbol that has a bunch of symbols in it. JUST WATCH WHAT YOU'RE DOING BASICALLY.
And that was all I could think of for this round. Oof. HOPE SOME OF THIS HELPS, ANYWAY.