Create animated blur effects in Fireworks

Enjoy the extension, I’ll release the FLA once I clean it up a bit. ;)

motionFX was created to ease the repetitious pain of going to each frame and incrementing the blur’s percentage for an animation. The motionFX extension allows you to create a sequence of bitmaps that are ready to be imported into Flash for rollover effects or any objects.

Download motionFX (2.0)

Access the motionFX panel by: Window > motionFX

Sample Tutorial

  1. Create a new document: 300w x 300h, 72dpi
  2. Create a text block called "motionFX" at 35pts or whatever you want (Company Logo etc..)
  3. With the Text Block object selected, open the motion FX panel (Window > motionFX) and select Zoom Blur from dropdown menu.
  4. Click the "Create" button and it will take a few seconds depending on your processor speed to render the animation.
  5. Open the Frames panel and observe the frames it created. (To learn how to use the frame panel, look up "Frames Panel" in the Help menu)
  6. Preview the animation by using the Frames "stop/play" buttons at the bottom of the canvas
  7. Insert a slice, open the optimize panel and change the settings to PNG 32, Matte: transparent / Change Canvas color to transparent
  8. Right-click the slice and select "Export Selected Slice…"
  9. Create a new folder on your HD somewhere to place the animation.
  10. Within the Export dialog, change name, and navigate the "Save as Type" drop-down menu to "Frames to Files" (This will export out the PNG Sequence for best results in Flash) Click "Save"
  11. Open Flash 2004 and Create a new Movie Clip.
  12. Import file of the PNG sequence (File > Import) into the empty MC
  13. Preview! (ctrl-enter)

A big thanks goes out to:

  • Brian Edgin
  • Hiroshi Miyazawa
  • Thijs Triemstra

for giving me guidance, ideas and helping me write cleaner ActionScript!

Of course, please let me know if you find bugs.

2 Responses to Create animated blur effects in Fireworks

  1. Lucian Dragomir says:
    January 18, 2006 at 8:40 pm

    i really liked your extension the first time i started playing with it. However, when i press “create fx”, new LAYERS are created, not frames. so like 12 blurred images overlap each other, on the same frame… how can i fix that?

  2. Alan Musselman says:
    January 19, 2006 at 8:57 am

    Hi Lucian -
    I havent seen that issue before and I’ll look into it. What version of Fireworks are you using? It works for FWMX2004 and above.