setMask question

1

How would one go about masking movie clips that are nested within other movie clips?

Is it even possible??

I have a photo gallery slider type of thingy that loads jpegs with loadMovie into containers. I can mask the entire movie clip but as for the containers,…well I just dont know whats going on here.

2

I don’t quite get your question, but basically, you can get all your masks inside one movieclip, call that maskMC, and then set that as a mask on the maskeeMC

maskeeMC.setMask(maskMC)

3

Funny, I dont quite get your answer.

Are you saying that I can nest masks movie clips within a masked movie clip??

I’ll try to make this clearer…

Basically, I need to be able to mask the movie clips that are nested within another movie clip. I can mask the main mc, but all other mc’s inside the main mc dont show. I try to mask to the target but that doesnt work either.

4

OK, I didn’t understand the questions so well, but basically:

A mask can only mask one target, so if you want to mask several separate clips with the same mask, you’ll have to put all the targets inside a container which will be masked.

A target can only have on emask, so if you want that several clips mask the same clip, you’ll have to put all your masks inside a container clip that will be set as mask.

That’s pretty much as clear as I can be :-\

5

Okay, I got it so far.

But there seems to be a problem with the .jpgs that are being loaded in to my container mc which is nested in the mc that holds everything I’d like to mask. I am using LoadMovie method to get the jpgs into the container.

Would this screw up the mask somehow?

6

something like this you mean?


//function which checks that jpg fully loaded into img clip before set this
//mask on the outer clip
outerClip.setMask("myMask");

ie you should have some function which checks that the img container clip has loaded its jpg before you set the mask on the ‘outer’ clip …

Anyway if you could post a snippet of your AS it would help.

7

Good idea. Here it is:

_root.reel_mc.placeholder1.loadMovie(“ka.jpg”);
_root.reel_mc.placeholder2.loadMovie(“ka.jpg”);
_root.reel_mc.placeholder3.loadMovie(“ka.jpg”);
_root.reel_mc.placeholder4.loadMovie(“ka.jpg”);

_root.reel_mc.setMask(_root.reelMask);

I also attached an FLA file. You just have to replace “ka.jpg” with a local pic of your to see what I’m talking about.

For the .FLA file I put together a simplified version derived from my website. I started with one cell and it worked fine. But,…as soon as I added more cells, it stopped showing them. Then, I took away the mask, and boom there they are! I just cant figure this one out.