Spinning Wheels

This tutorial will teach you how to animate a wheel so it can be used on a moving car.

Preview

Step 1

Draw the wheel you would like to "spin". Here's what I came up with.

Make sure that your rims and wheel are perfect circles. You can create a perfect circle by holding shift when creating your circle with the circle tool.

I cheated and just traced bitmap of an image for mine. I cant really draw that good.

Step 2

Select the entire wheel you just finished drawing and go to Modify -> Convert to symbol or hit F8.

Then match the box that pops up with mine.

Step 3

Create another keyframe where you want your tire to stop spinning I'm only going to have mine spin for 50 frames. So mine would look like this.

To create a keyframe right click on a frame and select convert to keyframe.

Step 4

Select the frame your second keyframe is in (50 in my case) and move your wheel to where you want it to roll to.

Step 5

Right click on the frames in between your first and last keyframe and select create motion tween.

You wheel should now move from the first spot to the second but it doesn't "roll".

Step 6

The tween must be created in order to continue.

Now click on any frame within the blue arrow. (your motion tween)

Look at your properties bar (most likely at the bottom of the screen)

And change the rotate from none to either auto, CW (clockwise), or CCW (counter clockwise) then select the number of time you wish it to rotate. Here's what I chose.

Also test out the ease property tight above the rotate. Try it at one extreme and then the other to see what it does.

Now your wheel should spin across the screen. Just add a car along with it and you got yourself a moving car.

Download .fla file here.

Enjoy