Adjusting Symbol Instances in Adobe Animate

Alright, in this video were going to look at adjusting our instances, so in our library here is our Mumma Bob, actually its Poppa Bob. And he is what’s called a symbol and over here are his instances or his children, so we want to style these children so they all look different. Were going to do it with these guys but it might be that say you want to do things when you’ve got instances and there's hundreds of them or thousands of them, say rain drops or snowflakes. You want them to be the same but have slight variations of them. And that’s what we’re going to do now is go and do some variation.

Now what you didn’t see, was in the video, I got halfway through showing you this already and it crashed. Why? It was because I was flipping between some filters really quickly and my machine went and died. So it brings up a good point. 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 so you need to at least save it once in the beginning and then it will auto recover. The only trouble is that it only does it every 10 minutes. I was only about 4 minutes into my little demo before it went and died. So I'm going to go straight ahead and adjust it. So under adobe animate and under preferences, if you're on a pc it’s under edit and way down the bottom here should have preferences. Or it should be somewhere. Animate CC, I'm going to go to preferences. And were going to switch to general and auto recovery. You definitely want this on but I'm going to turn mine down to every 2 minutes. Just so I don’t lose so much, I lost that whole 4 minutes of my animation there. The only problem with this is that its going to be a little bit more system demanding and its going to flicker and pause when its doing an auto recovery but hey ho, you decide what works for you.

Alright, so lets go off and start styling these guys. So there's a few easy things that we can do to make them look different. The scale is one of them, so I'm using my free transform tool and I'm going to click hold and drag it out. So I've got a few different fellas in here, you can be there. You can be that size, and you can be small. I'm going to copy and paste one of them so I've got a fifth one. a small guy at the font. So it’s giving it a feel of depth, so this guy may be further away because he’s smaller. 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 as I say if this is your snowflake’s you can rotate them around so they all weren’t looking exactly identical. Great, so there's the couple of things we can do.

The next ones we can do is I'm going to go back to my selection tool, I'm going to click on say this one here is under properties, if you're under library go back to properties. Under colour effect, there's one called style, brightness, not really used, just makes it lighter and darker. I don’t find that particularly useful. Go back to 0. This one here, tint changes the colour of it. This is great when you want to change the full colour but it does a bit of a weird thing where you can see it overlays my eye. It’s not a particularly great way of doing colour effects. You can lower the tint, so it’s just a hue over the top. Can you see it’s a bit green. Same with this one here, go to tint, ill pick blue. You can see I can kind of tint them a little bit but you might find useful for it, it’d be great for our snowflakes again or our raindrops or something else that’s a little bit more generic.

The other thing we can do is I'm going to click on this guy and were going to skip advance and go to alpha, alpha is how see through it is. It’s defaulted to 0. You might have to drag yours up or down. But you can see if I make it 50% see through, I can actually start seeing through this guy here. He’s the ghost version at the front there. One thing you can’t do is, well you can but watch this. If I select this guy. I already know he’s got a tint applied to him, I can’t do the alpha at the same time. It switches between alpha and tint. If you want to do both of them you go to advanced. And advanced gets really nerdy but it allows you to do the colour 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. Lets look at this one here, I'm going to get rid of the tint. I want it to be, oh it crashed again. Alright, lets see how far it went back, lets reopen it. Because it was auto saved and I took it down to 2 minutes, it’s going to try and restart it. Lets click yes, did I lose much? I didn’t did I, I'm doing alright. So that’s the reason we have auto recovery. Lets hit save to make sure I saved it, you need to save often especially when it’s crashing. Mine doesn’t tend to do this, I don’t fiddle around with these colour effects very often but it seems to be messing up with my machine this morning.

Alright, we’re back, so the last thing I want to show you is we’ve played around with the colour effects, the size, and rotation, now were going to play around with some of the filters down here. So I'm going to click on this guy here, the big guy and under filters, you might have to twirl it down. I'm going to hit this little drop down here and there's one in here called blur. So there's a few, I can make him glow, he’s got a red glow behind him, its not quite big enough I might have to make it bigger so you can see it. See the red glow, he can be different that way. I'm going to grab this guy and actually apply blur. I like the blur one, it makes it feel like he’s maybe really close so I'm going to do this guy, I'm going to add a second one to do blur, and I'm going to crank it up. So it feels like he’s out of focus depth of field wise, and he’s really close to the camera.

So you can play around with any of these filters, they're available in here and it just means that you can have one primary symbol and 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.