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Week 6 of the ActionScript intro carries on with the theme of coding rather than just talking about coding and as such again comes as a word document instead of slides. This week is where we start to have some fun with classes and dynamic creation of symbol instances. We start off by binding a bubble image to a simple class, and then tie it into the mouse cursor position, add in some colour transforms to liven things up and and stop our instances from giving you eye cancer by making them fade in and out through some manipulation of the each instance’s alpha property.

In this bundle I’ve combined both Week 6 Lessons 1 and 2 into a single document and provided the full source code to the exercises, but I highly recommend that you either start from scratch using the document as a guide or work from the 1st example source code and only peek at the completed source code if you get stuck because if you’re reading this then you want to learn to code, and you’re not going accomplish that by copying and pasting alone.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to build this:

Not a bad starting point for moving onto some way cooler stuff, eh?

Download link: An Introduction to ActionScript 3.0 – Week 6 (both lessons combined)
Audience: Beginners who know a little about variables, functions, objects and how to perform some basic programming math.
Format: PDF
Content License: This material is released under a creative commons non-commercial attribution share-alike 3.0 license by me (r3dux) and comes with no guarantee of correctness, fitness for purpose or anything of the sort.

Comments/feedback always welcome.

Bonus: You can find the code for the above animation with the start/stop on click code here.

I had to cover clipping and opacity masks in Illustrator CS4 for a class I’m teaching the other day, and they’re rather fun and easy to do, so I knocked up a guide I thought I’d share.

Read this.

Create this:

Or something much, much cooler =D

If you fancy having a go, remember that Adobe Illustrator can be downloaded free for a 30 day trial (although the download never works in linux w/ firefox – so I grabbed my copy through Internet Explorer on XP running through virtualbox). Once you use it for a while and get over the whole fighting the software stage, it’s actually not that bad…