Tip #5, Aliases

Now that you know a little about pre-/post-transforms and how SWF stored animation data, it'll be easier to understand the uses of LM aliases (see movie 1).

Movie 1: Choose Edit > Make Alias to make an alias of an object. You can also make an alias out of a Time Independant Group. (TIG)

Aliases make it easy to edit multiple objects at once in LM, and they export as single entities to Flash (that is, an animated TIG with several aliases should export to SWF just once). When you rotate or skew a symbol, you're usually applying a post-transform (that is, you're changing just the copy you're touching), but when you scale it, by default you're applying a pre-transform (that's why each copy scales). You can apply post-scales to an alias by first setting a scale stopwatch on the timeline, then scaling the alias. (see movie 2) Color and object properties (shape type, points, etc.) are pre-transforms.

Movie 2: Use the stopwatch in the Scale transform section of the Timeline to apply a post-scale change to an alias.

In the example above (duplicating time-independent groups and scaling one while keeping a single copy in the SWF), try making an alias to the original TIG animation, then setting a stopwatch and scaling the TIG (movie 3). This should ensure that LM exports just one copy and uses it twice in the SWF.

Incidentally, using aliases can also speed up the performance of LM and reduce the size of its LIV source files.

Movie 3: Create a TIG, then make an alias of the TIG. Finally, use the stopwatch to scale the TIG.