Expert: Joseph Silver - 2/8/2011

Question
1) What are the advantages of creating a tween? Describe some of the ways you might use tweening to make an animation more interesting.

2) In Photoshop, you can create a slice that, when clicked, will direct the browser to go to another URL or open a URL in a new browser. Describe a situation where you might use this technique. Describe the difference between a user slice and an auto slice. When would you use each of these?

Answer
Melissa,

It used to be that animators drew key poses then had their understudies draw the positions 'in-between' these key poses. This was time-consuming work. Nowadays, computer animators, both 2D and 3D, set keyframes and let the computer interpolate the change in between keyframes. The big advantage of this is that time is saved: what used to take a whole a team of animators now takes one person in a fraction of the time it used to take.

Slices are commonly use to break up a piece of artwork into an image map, on which, for example you might have buttons that point to other parts of a website. In this case, you would cut a slice for each button, then link each slice to a particular URL.

According to Adobe, here is the difference between user and auto slices:

"Slices created with the Slice tool are called user slices; slices created from a layer are called layer-based slices. When you create a new user slice or layer-based slice, additional auto slices are generated to account for the remaining areas of the image. In other words, auto slices fill the space in the image that is not defined by user slices or layer-based slices. Auto slices are regenerated every time you add or edit user slices or layer‑based slices. You can convert auto slices to user slices."

See this link:

http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Photoshop/10.0/help.html?content=WSfd1234e1c4b69...

Thanks,

www.designomotion.com