Reduce alpha of parent MovieClip without applying alpha to children

[coldscooter]

I have several images in a movie clip that slightly overlap each other.

When I reduce the alpha of the parent, it applies the alpha individually to each of the images, meaning you can see the image that is overlapped by a higher one.

Is there a way to apply the alpha to the whole group, such that the overlapping is maintained (without seeing the image behind where one is overlapping it)?

Thanks 

[n. tilcheff]

Hi mate,

They broke this a few versions back so you can't achieve this basic effect any more in recent versions of Animate.

Whether they will fix it is unclear. I have not seen anyone from the team acknowledge the issue.

If you have Animate 2015.2 or earlier, all you need to do is choose "Layer" blending mode for the Movieclip and the internals will not become separately semi-transparent.

This was the sole purpose of the existence of "Layer" blending mode.

If you don't have an older version, your only options are to either flatten your shapes or convert to bitmap (which again 'flattens' the image).

[coldscooter]

Well that sucks. Thanks for your reply 🙂

[JoãoCésar]

Hi.

Like Nick said, this feature is broken. I'm not sure why.

But one thing I noticed is that the appearance in the IDE and in the SWF is different.

In the IDE, we can see the shapes overlapping each other.

But when the movie is exported, the whole Movie Clip instance is faded out as a whole like we expect it to look.

Anyway, please report here so the team can address this issue for the next release.

Regards,

JC

[n. tilcheff]

Thanks for pointing this out, JC!

It does work as intended when exported to SWF - I suppose because Flash Player still follows the rule to properly blend "Layer", but unfortunately does not render correctly to PNG.

For the record: They broke the functionality when they introduced the so-called 'Advanced' layers.

[JoãoCésar]

Awesome, Nick!

Thanks for the explanation!