Very basic: Movieclip is not looping

[Hassert]

I'm so new to Animate that I'm making silly test scenes grope my way through understanding the key elements.

I'm working with a very simple html5 canvas file containing four movieclips made of the most basic drawing shapes, only two of which are animated. There's a "bird". Nested inside of bird are "head" and "wing", which have their own layers, and which are movieclips themselves with animation in the form of motion tweens. But the wing has a shorter animation than the head. When I test the scene, the entire head-wing animation loops, but the wing intermittently disappears once its segment is done. Whereas I want the "wing" to flap forever.

Everywhere I look, in these forums, the documentation, and on google, pouring through all conceivable iterations of relevant search terms and reading everything twice over, it says movieclips are supposed to loop automatically, existing inside their own interminable timeline. So I suspect I'm wildly misunderstanding something, or going insane.

My scene is extraordinarily simple; there's absolutely nothing else in that file except what I've described.

Things I've tried:

1. Trying it while the scene's animation frames are at least as long as the component animations

2. Trying making the scene only have one frame.

3. Triple checking that all my symbols are indeed movieclips

4. Toggling the playback looping

5. Toggling the loop checkbox in "Publish Settings..."

6. Extending animation frames of the "wing" to fill out the gap, but this just screws up the existing flapping animation and effectively makes me loop an animation I don't want.

Thanks for any help.

[marjantrajkovski]

use graphic symbols to control timelines

[JoãoCésar]

Hi.

Here is a possible solution:

dumb_bird_animation_edited.fla - Google Drive

It's a matter of correctly syncing the layers and setting the Graphic's properties to the required situation.

In your example, I only used Graphics so you can preview your animation entirely in authoring time.

Also because I think it will help you understand when it's better to have an animation wrapped in a container and how it can be correctly looped.

I hope it helps.

Regards,

JC

[Hassert]

Thanks! I still have a few questions about how this file is set up

How is the "animated wing" on the stage a graphic, when it's in an instance of a symbol that's a movieclip (in the library)?

What's going on with the animation frames on the timeline in the wing and torso layers (inside the bird graphic symbol) that I cannot change their length by hovering the mouse over the end of the created frames? I can select and remove frames, and then that messes up the visibility of these components in the overall animation. Simultaneously, I CAN mouse-change the length of the head layer, and those frames are in a different color (bluish, versus orange for the other two layers). What is going on?

What am I not getting about movie clips, in regard to my original file? I feel a bit like I'm getting gaslighted

"Animations inside movie clip symbols will loop automatically" -- Adobe tutorial

"a movie clip timeline loops continuously, independently of the main Timeline." -- another Adobe tutorial

"In fact a movieclip will normally loop endlessly unless there’s a stop() or similar action telling i... -- quora post from expert user

"So in other words, the symbol's timeline will play through its duration and then start over again, ... -- third party tutorial

"whereas movie clip symbols have self-contained animation that always loops" -- other third party tutorial

"Just put whatever animation you want to happen [in a loop] into its own movie clip" -- Stack Overflow

What's the unstated qualifier to these statements that I obliviously ran into?