Is there a way in adobe animate to have one stroke on 2 overlapping objects?

[thomasw41579767]

I'm using adobe animate 19.0. Is there a way to automatically have a stroke go over the outline of 2 shapes?

As you see, these are 2 shapes overlapping. I want just one outline around the whole shape. Like this:

I just made this manually, but is there any way I could automatically do this? So when I move a rectangle over another one, there would still be no inner stroke lines? And it would look like one shape. If it is possible, would there be away to combine it with motion tweens? So I could make the front rectangle move from side to side while still looking like one shape?

[n. tilcheff · Accepted solution]

Hi mate,

You can 'fake' this by having two layers per shape.

One that contains only fills and the other one with the outlines.

On the top two  layers you will move the fills-only rectangles.

On the bottom two the outlines.

In this way when they intersect you will only see the outer outline.

I'd set this so that each shape (if they are different) is one graphic symbol. First frame would be fill, second outline.

Then I'd do my animation with the fills only on two layers. When happy will duplicate the layers, move duplicates below and switch to frame 2.

Hope this helps!

[thomasw41579767]

How do I properly seperate the fill and stroke? When I seperate it without converting the stroke to a fill first (By cutting it and then pasting in place in a new layer), the fill is a little bit bigger than it was before. When I do convert the stroke to a fill, the fill is smaller than it was before. So there's either thinner outlines, or gaps between fill and line. Am I doing this wrong?

[thomasw41579767]

Never mind, I had a blue background, and thought the blue border that happens when you select something was the background. It wasn't, I just had to deselect to see what it looked like. Thank you for helping me with this.

[n. tilcheff]

Glad to have helped, mate!