Some way to rotate an object with skew already on it?

[whyme777x]

I did google for about an hour but the headache's grown too strong to continue, so here's the question.

So I just started an animation, a leaf fall sequence. I have the leaf keyframe-by-keyframe (i.e. no tween automation) animated to translate along a nice elegant float, and I wanted to add the rotation in afterwards. However, before starting I had to skew the shape a bit to get it how I wanted it to look at the start. Now every time I try to add some rotation to a frame it resets the skew before rotating. Is there any way to separate the two? Maybe keyframe individual attributes like I remember After Effects could?

Alternately, a second question: I figured out I can convert the bitmap to a symbol and that'll freeze the skew and then I can rotate the symbol, but between each keyframe it changes itself back to the original bitmap with the skew. I try selecting all the individual keyframes I need to convert and Convert to Symbol all at once, but it only converts the very last keyframe I selected, every previous one is untouched. Is there any way to convert the bitmap in every keyframe into a symbol?

I would very much appreciate any useful postings, i.e. answers or links. "Go read the forums" both is useless and has been tried a headache-inducing amount.

[Colin Holgate · Accepted solution]

I see the problem. You're using the Transform palette to do the changes. Instead, select the leaf, and choose the Free Transform Tool (or press the letter Q). Now you can point near the corners of the bounding box, and you get the rotate cursor appear. It should rotate without changing the skew.

For interest, if you had done a Motion Tween instead of frame by frame, you can then right-click on the frame in that layer of the timeline, and Insert a keyframe for just rotation, or just skew, for example. That would allow you to have the rotation take a different number of frames than another tween of the skew.

[whyme777x]

Thanx, that seems to be exactly what was needed. Strangely, the Transform palette (as you called it?) doesn't tweak the skew on its own anymore, maybe some weird temp memory issue was going on, I dunno (these are community college Apple computers, bound to be something weird going on in the background), but I'm gonna ignore it now and focus on Free Transform Tool (Q).

As for Motion Tween, totally helpful info for future projects, but unfortunately this class is focused on bringing hand-drawn animation techniques to digital tools. Normally I totally would - I was first intro'd to digital animation by After Effects circa 2012's tweening style - but it's against his rules Thanx tho ❤️

[Colin Holgate]

I checked with Flash Pro CS6 and CS3, and they both also only give you a choice of rotate or skew. I think it's because rotate is a special case of skew, where the two values are the same. The free transform tool seems not to have to stick to that rule.