Adjusting Symbol Instances in Adobe Animate

All right, in this video we're gonna look at  adjusting our instances. Okay? So in our library here is our, um,  mama Bob, actually it's Papa Bob. And he is, uh, what's called a symbol. And over here are his instances or his children. Okay?

So we wanna style these children so they all look different. This could be say, um, we're gonna do it with these guys,  but it might be that,  say you wanna do things when you've got instances  and there's hundreds of them,  or thousands of them say like rain drops  or something, or snowflakes. And you want them to be the same, but very similar. Uh, sorry the same but have slight variations of them. Okay? And that's what we're gonna do now,  is go and do some variation.

Now, what you didn't see was in the video that I,  I got halfway through showing you this  already and it crashed. Why? It was,  'cause I was flipping between some filters really quickly  and my machine went and died. And, um, so kind of brings up a good point. Um, it does have an auto recovery. You must give it a name to start with.

If it's called untitled, it doesn't work very well, okay? So you need to at least save it once at the beginning  and then it will re, uh, auto recover. The only trouble is, is that it does it every 10 minutes. So I was only about four minutes into my little demo  before it went and died. So I'm gonna go show you how to adjust it. So under, um, Adobe animate  and under preferences, uh, if you're on a pc,  it's under edit and right down the bottom here should have  preferences or it should be somewhere, okay?

Um, um, anate cc, I'm gonna go to preferences  and we're gonna switch to general and auto recovery. You definitely want this on. Um, but I'm gonna turn mine down to every two minutes, okay? Just so I don't lose so much. I lost that whole bit, the whole four minutes  of my little uh, animation there. The only problem with this is that it's going  to be a little bit more system demanding  and it's gonna kind of flicker  and pause when it's doing an auto recovery,  but hey, ho you decide what works for you.

Um, alright, so let's go off and start styling these guys. So there's a few easy things we can  do to make them look different. The rot, uh, the scale is one of them. So I'm using my free transform tool  and I'm gonna click hold and drag it out. Okay? So I've got a few different fellas in here.

You can be there, you'll be that size  and you can be a nice bit smaller. Okay? I'm gonna copy and paste one of them. So I've got a fifth one, even smaller guy way at the front. Okay? So it's kind of giving a, uh, a feel of depth.

Okay? So this guy maybe further away 'cause he's smaller. And another thing you can do with the free transform  tool is obviously rotate them. So that's something you can do with different instances  to make them look a little different. So say if this is your snowflakes, you could kind  of rotate them around so they all weren't looking  exactly identical. Great.

So there's a couple of things we can do. The next ones we can do is I'm gonna go  back to my selection tool. I'm gonna click on, say this one here is under properties. Okay? If you're on library, go back  to properties under color effect. There's one called style brightness.

I don't really use, just kinda makes it whiter and darker. Okay? I don't find that particularly useful. Put it back to zero. Um, this one here, tint. Okay, this changes the color of it.

This is great when you wanna change the full color,  but it does a bit of a weird thing  where you can see it overlays my eye  and it's not a particularly  great way of doing color effects. You can lower the tint. So it's kind of like just a hue over the top. I guess there's a bit green. Same with this one here. I'll go to tint and I'll pick a blue.

You can see I can kind of tint them a little bit,  but, uh, it's, uh, you might find useful for it. It'd be great for us. Snowflakes again or raindrops  or something else that's a little bit more generic. And the other thing we can do is I'm gonna click on this guy  and um, we're gonna skip advanced and go to alpha. Alpha is how See-through it is, it's defaulted to zero. Okay?

You might have to drag yours up or down,  but you can see if I make a 50% see-through, it's actually,  um, yeah, I can start seeing through this guy. Here is the ghost version, the front there. And one thing you can't do is, wow, you can, but watch this. If I select this guy  and I know he is got a color applied to him called Tint,  I can't do the alpha at the same time, it switches  between alpha and tint. Okay? If you wanna do both of 'em, you go to advanced  and Advanced gets really nerdy,  but it allows you to the color one  and there's your alpha there and you can lower it down.

So you can do tint and alpha at the same time. Alright, so that's some of the things. Let's look at, uh, this one here. I'm gonna get rid of the tint. Um, I want it to be, oh, it crashed again. All right, let's see how far it went back  with my, uh, let's reopen it.

And because it was auto saved, um,  and I chalk it down to two minutes. Let's see. It's gonna try and restart it. Let's click yes. Did I lose much? I didn't, did I?

Doing all right. Alright. So that's the reason we have order recovery. It's hit save to make sure I've saved it. So you need to save often, especially when it's crashing. Mine doesn't tend to do this.

I I don't fiddle around with these color effects very often,  but it seems to be messing up with my machine this morning. Alright, we're back. Um, okay, so now we're back. So the last thing I wanna show you is we've played around  with the color effects, the size of rotation. Now we're gonna play around with some  of the filters down here. So I'm gonna click on this guy here, the big guy.

Um, and under filters, okay, you might have to toilet down. I'm gonna hit this little drop down here. And there's one in here called Blur. So this is a few. I can make him glow. He's got a red glow behind him,  so they're not, not quite big enough.

I might have to, um, make it bigger so you can kind of start  to see it, see the red glow. So he could be different that way. I'm gonna grab this guy and actually apply him. I'm gonna use the one blue. Okay. I like the blue one.

It kind of makes it feel like he's maybe really close. I I'm gonna do this guy actually, you're gonna,  I'm gonna add a second one to be  blue and I'm gonna crank it up. So it feels like he's kind of like out  of focus depth of field wise. Um, he's really close to the camera. Okay. So you can play around with blur, you can play with any  of these filters okay.

That are available in here. And it just means that, uh, you can have one primary  symbol, MC, Bob, and lots of his instances  and they only load one mc Bob,  but all of his instances can be transformed  to look quite unique, keeping the file size nice and low.