Free Transform Tools in Adobe Animate
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
Hi this video were going to look at the transform tool. The transform tool is this guy here, I'm going to select him. Now its used for scaling and rotating. So what I'm going to do is unlock these earlier layers so I can play with these little bits. So I'm going to click on this crazy looking building here. You'll notice that the difference is we've got these little edge bits. And there's a couple of things. If I grab any of the corner, can you say I can stretch it in any sort of way and corner. But what I want to do is hold down shift, if I hold shift can you see, it scales it proportionally rather than stretching it all sorts of ways. So often you'll want to scale it proportionally to make a bigger building. Great. You'll notice it scales from the center, it actually scales from tis point here. now when you are new you'll end up trying to move it. Say I want to move this to the right here, you'll end up grabbing the center and moving it and actually, you're meant to do this. But you end up dragging this and this is the center of rotation and it just means that if I move this down here, and now I scale it holding shift can you see it scales from that bottom corner there. So if I move it up here in the top left and I try and use the exact same one, can you see it scales in and out of there, so that’s quite interesting at that point here when you are doing animations and you want it to enlarge or rotate on a point and this is the point here that its going to rotate from.
So that’s scaling, there's a couple of other things you can do with the free transform tool can you see if I hover anywhere out of here the cursor changes to this little round thing with an arrow. If I click and hold and drag it and just move it around, if I hold shit while I'm dragging it, it will lock it into 90 degree angles. So that’s rotation. There's another one for skew, if I hover above any of these lines here, can you see that double arrow, if I click it and drag it I can skew it, so I'm going to go to edit, undo.
The only last thing about the free transform tool, is that if I'm on the selection tool, the quick way to go into the transform tool is tap the Q key, if I tap Q it jumps to that tool there without me having to go and click it and I can start doing my transformations. V is jumping to the selection tool, and you'll know, watch this, V and Q,, V and Q, and you'll notice over here, that its toddling between V and Q. You start learning some shortcuts when you're reusing some tools over and over again. To know what the shortcuts are you'll see here, it’s called a selection tool and you see in the brackets there its got a V. This one here has a Q, and if you're using the type tool is a T. and there's lots of ones in here, just hover above them and they’ll tell you what shortcut it is. Alright, lets hit save and move on to the next video.