Blitzkrieg, Part 1

Hey everyone, this is the beginning of a tank animation I am working on right now. My first step on this one was to create the body of the tank. I drew all the lines, the curves, and the star, as well as the treads and then combined all the individual parts into one large, transformable piece (using the union function). I then created a second layer and made the wheel. I animated the wheel to rotate slightly each frame, and then changed the new wheel animation into a "Symbol" which essentially allows for an animation within an animation. (The wheel will rotate as the tank goes forward). After the wheel was made, I began to animate the tank body to move across the screen and hit a bump in the road by tilting the tank body upwards and then gradually downwards, then back to the original position. (the road is on the way). When this was done, I made six layers and put a wheel in each one, positioned them where they needed to be, and then animated them (using a techinque called "Tweening." If you want to know more, talk to me in person, as this is a tutorial all in its own.). To make the treads have motion, I went in to each individual frame and changed the tank treads slightly to give them the jitter you see above. The final step was to fill in behind the wheels, which was easily done by adding a final background layer and coloring in the wheel area on each individual frame.


--Martin