The Tween Animation feature added to the new version of both Opus Pro and Opus Creator is a hugely powerful tool with a wide range of uses from unusual text effects and fun animations in Flash to powerful technical simulations for health and safety training or in a presentation a PhD thesis.

• animate objects between two points by simply setting start and end
• morph objects between different shapes
• recolour objects in a smooth progression
• transform objects completely from one to another

All of these can be achieved quickly and easily by simply creating a keyframe for each major change and then letting Opus create the frames in between.

Important Considerations

The tween is a very powerful feature which can produce some spectacular results but it is also powerful enough to get yourself in a spectacular mess. Whilst simple tweens are very easy, we recommend some planning to ensure more complex tweens work as expected. Visit the other sections of this coverage to fully understand how to get the most from the tween object and do lots of experiments to understand what is possible and what is not.

• create your objects outside the tween and once you've started adding keyframes make only the edits required at those keyframes, making more fundamental changes can make it difficult to predict the results.
• tweens are "dumb" when published to Flash so you can only add actions to the tween object itself but you can use the Synchronsie to Tween Frame action to time other events even in Flash.
• make the tween big enough for all your action before you start - resizing the tween after you've started will mean previous keyframe co-ordinates get recalculated and you won't be able to predict or control the results.
• if you plan extreme node editing it can be useful to include a large, framing polygon (with no fill or outline) which reamins stable and sets the boundary for the node-editing of other objects. It means you can always be sure your editing will not use co-ordinates consistently.