After following a very handy tutorial by Lee Brimelow and then modifying the end result, I came up with my first Papervision 3D 2.0 animation! Let me know what you think.

This tutorial is part 2 of a series of posts on creating a music player. Click the links below to view the other posts in the series:

• Part 1 - Using Sound in ActionScript 3
• Part 3 - Creating a Pause Button
• Part 4 - Creating a Mute Toggle Button

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In our last tutorial, we talked about how to create a simple music player using ActionScript 3 with a play button and a stop button.In this tutorial, we'll take our music player one step further as we discuss how to add a volume slider to our Flash file.If you want to follow along, download the source file from the previous tutorial. This is the file we'll be starting with.

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As a trainer, one of the questions I get a lot from beginners is "How do I do 3D in Flash?" And historically, I've always had to break it to them gently that there really is no inherently easy way of creating 3D illustrations and animations for Flash without shelling out a few bucks on products like Swift 3D (which I still highly recommend, by the way).

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This tutorial is Part 1 of a series of tutorials on creating a music player. Click the links below to view the other posts in the series:

• Part 2 - Creating a Volume Slider
• Part 3 - Creating a Pause Button
• Part 4 - Creating a Mute Toggle Button

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Lately it seems that everyone has become somewhat of a music snob. Everyone is convinced that his or her taste in music is perfectly objective and that anyone who doesn't like his or her favorite band is intellectually inferior. For instance, if you were to tell me that you didn't adore The Shins, Led Zeppelin, and/or Billy Joel, I would probably write your mother a letter, verbally assaulting her for drinking so much vodka while she was pregnant.

Anyways, in an era where melodic snobbishness is so prevalent, everyone with a website (or a MySpace account) wants to play their favorites for the whole world to hear, so if you're a Flash designer/developer, it might do you some good to learn how to import, play, and modify sound in ActionScript.In this tutorial, I'm going to introduce you to using sound in ActionScript 3, and in later posts, we'll start to get a little more in depth with the different things we can do with sound.

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I recently had a request for a tutorial on how to apply masks using ActionScript 3.0. If you've ever tried doing this with AS 3, then you've probably discovered that it doesn't work the same as it did in AS 2.

So, for those of you who have never used masks, or for those who have never used ActionScript to create masks, let's start with the basics.

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In the last particle effect tutorial, I laid the groundwork for creating a randomized particle system. In this tutorial, we're going to build on what we've already created, so if you haven't read the last tutorial, you might not get too much out of this one.

Since we're all experts now on creating a basic particle system, this tutorial won't be as lengthy as the last one. In fact, in order to achieve our goals for this tutorial, we'll only have to add a couple simple lines of code.

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As I watched the goat leap gracelessly into the air, I thought to myself, "What an amateurish attempt at animation!" Where's the anticipation, when the goat rears back before its jump? Where's the squash and stretch? Where's the follow through? Why was this done at such a low frame rate?

But then again, what more can you expect from an animation that was created over five thousand years ago?

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Lynda.com's FlashForward Conference has been a constant spring of refreshment for me over the last few years, and I was recently disheartened to hear rumors of its pending demise. Thankfully, however, the rumors were just that.

Minutes ago, I received an email from Lynda herself (okay, so she sent it to everyone on her mailing list) assuring me that FlashForward would indeed live on through a new owner by the name of Beau Ambur, CEO of Metaliq, an interactive application development company. I don't know much about Beau, but Lynda seems to speak highly of him, so he can't be all that bad.

Anyways, if you've never been to a FlashForward conference before, I highly recommend going sometime. Every time I go, I'm reminded all over again why I love Flash, and I'm just pleased as punch to hear that it will continue.

In the last post, we discussed the basics of how particle effects work. To sum it all up, a particle effect basically involves creating a single movie clip and then using ActionScript to duplicate it, randomize it, and animate it on the stage.

Now that we understand the basics of particle effects, let's actually put these ideas to use in Flash CS3.

In this tutorial, we'll be creating an effect with random particles flying out from the center of the stage in random directions, with random sizes and opacities.

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