Rendering Techniques

Summary

This chapter didn’t cover too much about making anything move, but it did show you a number of ways to create visual content, which you’ll learn how to animate in future chapters. Specifically, the chapter covered the following topics:

• Color, 24-bit and 32-bit

• The drawing API

• Filters

• The BitmapData object

These subjects will give you the tools you need to make dynamic, expressive content for your animation, and since everything covered here is based on ActionScript, you can animate directly using all of these methods. Just use some code to create content, change the variables used in the code, and render it again.

You’ll be using many of the techniques introduced in this chapter throughout the book, so it will be useful for you to know and understand them well now. In fact, you’ll get your first hands-on experience using several of these techniques in the next chapter, which covers velocity and acceleration.