# How to create an animated outline?

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/how-to-create-an-animated-outline/324204>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [August 8, 2011, 2:20pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/how-to-create-an-animated-outline/324204 "2011-08-08T14:20:24Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Orya](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Orya](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/Orya)\
**Post date:** [August 8, 2011, 2:20pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/how-to-create-an-animated-outline/324204/1 "2011-08-08T14:20:24Z")

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Hi.

For a project I wanted to create something, that resembles something like this:

- a very detailed waterdrop
- some kind of ooze
- some kind of amoeba

Something like that. A roughly round organically animated thing, with a darker outline. Now I wondered how to realize this. I basically had three ideas so far.

a) I draw the outline with actionscript, using drawing function to create dynamically a shape out of curves, fill it with a fitting color and make the outline more distinct using the linestyle. The problem: I’m not sure if there is any realistic chance to also animate this without using thousands of lines of code.

b) I create several round shapes that are close to each other. All of them have the same color, and I move them slowly around, so that they look like a single shape with a curved border slowly animated. Then I add an outline by creating a thin but very strong glow effect. Problem: These filters take up a lot of processing power, and the Glowfilter will be slightly blurry (beeing a glow filter after all), which is not the effect I want.

c) I draw the shapes by hand, give them manually an outline and animate the thing using tweens and stuff. Problem: I don’t think I can animate them fluently enough that way.

Anyone got any ideas?

**Or in short:**  
How do I in flash create something, that has a fluent organic animation and a distinct outline?

Thanks for any thoughts.