This tutorial will teach you the basics of masking in Flash MX 2004.

Masking is illuminationg portion of your graphic in the layer below.

When you surfing through internet you might have seen lots of beautiful Flash effects such as ripple effect , some wording with nice background or glitter bordering an object, and you might wondered "How it can be done? and What's the logic used for this". This is called masking. We will go through this step by step.

Please note:

1. You need to have Flash Player 7.0 installed to view.

Hope the reader has basic knowledge of flash such as Shape Tween and working with layers.

STEPS TO FOLLOW

Inserting Layers and Naming them

• By default you will have a layer, insert one more layer, so you will have two layers now. We need two layers to mask an object.
• Rename the top layer to "Mask" and the layer below that to "background".

Creating Shape Tween

• Import your image to the "background" layer.
• Take Oval tool from tool box, draw a circle in the "Mask" layer and delete it's border.
• Drag the circle to one end of your picture.
• Then go to"frame 40" of your "Mask" layer and press "F6" to insert a new keyframe.
• Now go to "frame 40" of your "background" layer and press "F5" to insert frames, so the background image is available through out your mask.
• Select "frame 40" of your "Mask" layer, that is your new keyframe, Keeping the playhead on "frame 40" of "Mask" layer, drag the circle to other end of the image.
• Then go back to "frame 1" of the "Mask" layer, keeping the playhead on "frame 1" of "Mask" layer, select Shape tween from properties window.

Masking

• Right click on the "Mask" layer and select Mask.
  

You are done! Press Ctrl+Enter to view the result.

See one more sample given below to get more ideas.