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[♪upbeat electronic music♪] ADOBE TV Presents... Paul Trani in... Adobe Flash Professional CSS - Training with Trani The Deco Tool was introduced in Flash CS4. It's pretty powerful, but it's gotten even more robust since CS4. In CS5, it's definitely really powerful and really helpful. I'm going to go ahead and show you all of it and everything it can do. Again, halfway down, I'm going to select the Deco Tool, and what it is, is it's like a procedural drawing tool. In general, I'm going to go ahead and select the tool, and then define its properties in the properties panel. So, right over here on the side, notice how I can select any one of these items--these top three. Again, I'm in Flash CS4 but I'm going to go beyond that. In fact, I'm going to jump down here to the Building Brush. I'm going to select the Building Brush, and notice that the options say that it's going to give me a Random building. All I'm going to do is I'm just going to click and drag. I'm going to start drawing these buildings, and as you can see, it gives me these random buildings. It really allows me to create this sort of cityscape pretty quickly. Again, this is actually just a js file, and if you were so inclined, you could actually write your own Deco Brushes. So again, just some quick buildings, kind of, in here-- that looks pretty good, why not? Great--it works out really well. Again, I'm going to use the Deco Brush, the Deco Tool and I'm going to select a different brush. In this case, I'm going to go beyond that Building brush. Let's go down to the Tree brush, because, again, I'm making this scene. I'm going to select this next layer above it, and now I can go ahead and draw. Notice, I have Aspen Tree selected. With that tree selected, I can just go ahead and click and drag. Look at how it builds that tree--pretty darn awesome, if you ask me. Again, I'm just clicking and dragging. It creates that tree. If I was to create this on my own, this would just take hours, but in Flash, obviously, you can see that it does it pretty quickly. Let me jump down to a Winter Evergreen. I'm going to draw this out and see what this looks like. I can sort of reposition these all I want, whatever the case may be--but you can see that I can draw trees. Let's go ahead and switch this one more time. I'm going to jump over to the Flower Brush and from there, I'm going to make sure Garden Flower is selected. I can even adjust the size down to say, 50 percent, if I want to, on both the flower and the leaf. Let's just position this, and I can start to draw this little trail of flowers. Obviously, you can see what it does. It really allows me to create this scene quickly. So there we are so far--just a quick scene. I'm going to go ahead and show you some other tools that I can use. I'm going to go ahead and turn on this layer, because this is all about the internal organs and processes for the human body. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and select the Deco Brush, and I'm going to select the Deocrated Brush. So this is another brush that really has a lot of options in here. Again, I encourage you to peruse these at your convenience. I'm going to select Thick Arrows for my project. Pattern color is going to be black, and now I can go ahead and click and drag. So again, I'm just kind of drawing the circulation of air within the lungs, but you can see how quickly I can do this. I don't have to position all of these arrows one at a time manually. Ah, but you're still not impressed? Let's go beyond that. I'm going to select the Deco Tool and the last brush I'm going to use is going to be this Fire Animation. That's right--you can have a brush that has animation in it. So Fire Animation is selected. We're going to go ahead and give this guy heartburn--how about it? I'll just click right in there, and it generates this fire. If you notice in my timeline, you can see it starts to generate that animation. It's just a sort of frame by frame animation, but obviously, it's doing all this work that I don't have to do, and that's really why I love it. So let's just give it a second to finish out. If my timeline wasn't already extended, it would extend out my timeline for that particular layer. There we are, again--my animation. If I just go to the beginning and hit return, I can see that sure enough, the character--this guy--does have heartburn. Again, those were just some real quick examples of using the Deco Tool, defining the different Brushes, customizing them-- There's a lot you can do, so I just really encourage you to go out there and explore it. Thank you so much for joining me today. [♪upbeat electronic music♪] ADOBE TV Productions tvadobe.com
