Comments on: (Flash CS3) Masking using ‘donut’ shapes within movie clips or with AS3 - it’s possible, and not too bad either

By: stahlman

stahlman — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 07:58:10 +0000

Thanks this solved my problem. The strange thing is that it previews correctly, but won’t render upon publish to swf.

By: Fuat Akgüm

Fuat Akgüm — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 13:09:30 +0000

Firstly, thanks for tip.

I was trying to mask a movie clip with Circle plus another square. But they were in different places in stage so only the upper shape(circle) was masking the mc. Then I have to merge them with a hairline and convert hairline to shape.

By: Patrick Matte

Patrick Matte — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:38:25 +0000

Oh I just found the answer

graphics.beginFill(0x00FF00);
graphics.drawCircle(250,250,100);
graphics.drawCircle(250,250,50);
graphics.endFill();

By: Patrick Matte

Patrick Matte — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:29:46 +0000

Is it possible at all to dynamically draw a donut shape?

By: Jeff Hebert

Jeff Hebert — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 16:35:56 +0000

Robin’s clockwise tip saved the day. This was driving me absolutely insane, until a fortuitous Google search brought me here, to the great original article and the dead-on comment by Robin.

Thank you thank you thank you both! I don’t have all that much hair left any more, but what little I have was getting ripped out in frustration.

And for the record, this is the stupidest bug I can think of. Crazy.

By: Ann Arbor Web Site Graphics Design

Ann Arbor Web Site Graphics Design — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 07:23:57 +0000

That is a neat tip. Thanks for sharing it with us.

By: Robin Debreuil

Robin Debreuil — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 08:07:00 +0000

nice post : )

This is almost certainly because of clockwise vs counterclockwise issues. If you use the lasso tool, it will work if you make the hole going clockwise, but not if you go the other way.

One other thing you can also do is convert the mask to vector data, and then insure that data is clockwise. Yeah it is a bit extreme, but it should work in all cases. I have an old jsfl file that converts this data (http://debreuil.com/ASDraw/selectionToDrawingAPI.zip) though it is a bit compressed.

Anyway, mostly just to mention it is probably a ccw issue — and yeah, a Flash bug imo : )