Ah, yes...the venerable Aqua buttons Apple unleashed on the world lo those many years ago. Sure, they may seem a little turn-of-the-century these days, but you still see them littered about like so much confetti. And since the basic Aqua button was heretofore unattainable in Flash without the use of some creative Photoshopping, I can't think of a better model to use for a tutorial on how you can implement Flash 8's new filters and blends to create clean, scalable interface widgets like our old friend the Aqua button.

LightWave is one of those programs that is heavily dependent on plug-ins, so when you hit upon something that LightWave can't easily do by itself, it's not real difficult to find a plug-in to pick up the slack. One particular shortcoming that frustrates many a LightWaver is that while you can have an object follow a motion path, there's no real built-in way to have an object deform along the path it's following. But fret not: there's a darn good plug-in that will ultimately save the day, and it's free to boot. Let's check it out.

Ever since I initially dove headfirst into the shallow end of the pool that is standards-based Web design a couple of years ago, I've endured a love-hate relationship with CSS. I love the flexibility and simplicity of offloading page styles to an external document, but hate the varying ways in which today's modern browsers interpret my intentions. That's where so-called "bad" CSS comes in, and one set of tricks in particular has become an oasis in my quest to get closer to the elusive "pixel-accurate" promise of CSS.

Believe it or not, we've come a long way. Fresh off our triumphant first script from last time, we're going to follow up today with a more casual discussion of such vague and jelly-like concepts as properties, operators, types, and functions. I'm going to try to make all this stuff as clear (and fun, if that's even possible) as I can, because although it's somewhat dry material, it's crucial stuff to (at least partially) grasp if you want to take the next step and start writing truly useful ActionScript.

As I dive deeper and deeper into Flash 8 Pro, a few things are starting to stand out as "stealth" features, meaning that while not exactly highly touted, they are proving themselves highly useful. One such feature is 9-slice scaling (AKA Scale-9), which, judging by its various names, would seem to refer to some sort of scaling and/or slicing. So what exactly is Scale-9, and just how "highly useful" could it possibly be?

When we left off, we had just gotten our simple setup moved over to Layout. Today, we have just a couple of chores left to do before our scene is ready to light, and then we'll get to the much-delayed promise of setting up radiosity to help hide the fact that the scene is so gawdawful in the first place. Let's dive right back in, shall we?

After last episode's short detour, we're back on track. Now, all the talk about targeting way back in part 2 was the equivalent of taking the scenic route (long way around, lot more to see), but I hope that exercise gave you a sense of where instances of symbols "live" in relation to each other and how to start thinking about those relationships (an exercise which certainly wasn't a waste of time in terms of where we're going with this). Today, though, we'll explore a much easier way to target objects and (finally!) write our first official script.

It's been quite a while since the last installment of this series, in which I offered up some tips on faking radiosity to help add a bit of realism while cutting down on render times. But what happens if the opposite is true, and you have a project where setup time needs to be kept to a minimum and render time doesn't matter? In addition to being a beautiful, photorealistic way of rendering scenes in LightWave, radiosity can also serve as a virtual dab of Clearasil by covering up blemishes when budgets are tight.

Sixteen months. That's how long it's been since part 2 of this series, which, for the curious, happened to be a whirlwind tour of how to target symbols in Flash. While there was a good reason for this protracted absence (I was insanely busy and not writing anything for a year), it's still been WAY too long between installments. Today, all that gets rectified (I hope), provided you can get over the not-entirely-small fact that I'm going to renege on what I promised we were going to do last time. How's that for a page turner?

When we last left off, we were knee-deep in the creation of our masterpiece cross-platform Projector in Director MX 2004, one that consists of a single button that launches a PDF file. Exciting stuff, to be sure, but we're only halfway there. Join me as we continue our journey, this time as we venture outside the cozy confines of DMX04 and into the equally exciting world of moving files and manipulating text documents. And with a buildup like that, how could you not be breathless with anticipation?

If you're reading this now, you either 1) bought into the whole "you should really be using ActionScript even though you're a designer" schpiel I outlined in our last installment, or 2) are here as a result of some sort of freak accident. Either way, today we're going to embark on the second leg of our journey into the strange and wonderful world of ActionScript, this time focusing on object targeting by examining how Flash keeps track of stuff behind the scenes.

It's been quite some time (six months, which might as well have been during the Nixon administration) since the first installment of this series, so there's no time like the present to press on with our whirlwind tour of various lighting features in LightWave. Today, we're going to go through a fairly simple technique that can add a hint of radiosity to your scenes without the usual associated rendering hit. Intrigued? Of course you are. So let's begin...

If you're a Flash designer, there are probably a million reasons why you might be reluctant to go down the ActionScript road. I know, because I probably went through each of those reasons myself before I finally bit the bullet. But learning at least a little about ActionScript can really help you take your design work to the next level, so over the coming weeks I'll be showing you a few tricks that should help make the leap into ActionScripting a little less jarring. First, though, I'm going to have to address the skeptics.

After my recent "must buy" review of Director MX 2004, suffice it to say that I think DMX04 is once again the mack daddy (or is it the daddy mack? Or am I so hopelessly stuck here in my 1992 Kriss Kross getup that it doesn't even matter?). Regardless of my current street cred, one of the mack-daddiest features packed into DMX04 is the ability to publish Mac or Windows projectors from a single copy of Director on either platform. However, the seas can get a little rough once you actually try to make things cross-platform, and they can get even rougher when (heaven forbid) you start throwing Xtras into the mix, so here are a few pointers on keeping the waters calm.

Last time we left off just as things were starting to get interesting, as we had added faux scanlines, a hotspot, and a nice bulge effect to our fan-tabulous screenshot of the Library of Congress site. The whole idea, of course, is to inject a little va-va-voom into the traditionally boring subject of screenshots in a video, so let's continue on and finish prettying this sucker up.

Every once in a while, some of us are called upon to perform a task so heinous, so unmentionable, so undeniably hideous that the very thought of it is generally enough to send even the atheists amongst us fleeing to the nearest place of worship to pray for our very souls. The task, of course, is to somehow make the average, ordinary screen capture somehow look like the most exciting bit of animation that has ever existed. But never fear. Here's one way to dress it all up, with Photoshop and After Effects as our instruments of salvation.

3D lighting, and "real world" lighting for that matter, is a lot like hair. Good hair can radically enhance even the plainest of faces, while a mullet (for example) tends to uglify those who might otherwise be "purty" (as some are wont to say in my neck of the woods). By the same token, good 3D lighting can make even the simplest scene beautiful, while bad 3D lighting can turn your meticulously crafted objects, pixel-perfect surfacing, and butter-smooth keyframing into a flat, uninteresting mess. But, as we'll see during the course of this series, it really doesn't take a lot to get into that good 3D lighting frame of mind. So let's start the ball rolling by going over what the art of the possible is with LightWave's lights.

Shockingly enough, it didn't take me three months between installments this time, so we can pretty much pick up right where we left off without me apologizing or otherwise stammering through some sort of excuse. We're going to take one more peek at where some of the main interface elements you're used to from After Effects can be found in Combustion, finishing up with a extended look at the centerpiece of the Combustion workflow: the Operator Controls. Yes, I'm sure you have goose bumps the size of golf balls right now just thinking about the excitement that promises to ensue, so let's get right down to business.

We had sort of an abrupt ending to the last installment, for which I apologize, but there was a good reason. After all, I could have just kept writing and writing and writing about where things are in Combustion, resulting in an article that very well could have rivaled War and Peace in the length department (and, as some might argue, boringness department as well). So I decided to pull a Miramax/Kill Bill thing and split this particular aspect of our series into a couple of separate installments. As "they" say, onward and upward.

We're going to wrap up our series today with a lively discussion of one of the more flexible techniques for character animation: bones. Now, in the real world, the words "flexible" and "bones" may not belong in the same sentence without requiring a trip to the emergency room, but as this is the magical land inside your computer, the two words are quite comfortable being in the same proximity. As usual, I'm rambling already, so let's just dive right in and take a look.