Flash Help! (Rollovers)

[follicle]

I'm a graphic designer for an underground construction company and I'm currently working on the flash entrance for our website. In it, I have a collage off the different equipment we use to work underground. I would like for visitors to be able to hover over a piece of equipment and for the name of the equipment to appear next to it. I'm experience with making button rollovers, but I've never worked on making parts of an image a rollover. So here's what I did (which of course, didn't work):


I went to each piece of equipment and drew a box around it with the rectangle tool. I then converted all of the boxes to symbols and then to buttons. I then changed the blend mode on these buttons to "erase" so they weren't visible. I then went into the button editing mode, added the necessary key frames and text, and went to test it out. The buttons were present, but no rollover. I changed the blending mode so that the buttons were visible and then I tried it again. They worked. I learned that making the button's invisible will also make any rollover effects invisible.


So is there a proper way to go about doing this? I've worked with slices before in ImageReady to achieve the same effect. Is there anything comparable in Flash? Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions!

[transmit failure]

well with most programs there are a couple ways to accomplish this. One way to try is to make a new button symbol, (shift F8) and put a small rectangle in the "hit" keyframe, nothing in the other keyframes, nothing at all. Now what you basically have is an invisible button. If you put the button on your timeline, it should appear blue, don't worry, that is only to show you where the button is when you publish it, it will be invisible.
My preference, is to make one of these symbols, and re-use it multiple times in a flash movie.

So you have your invisible button. Now make a movie clip. This will act as the 'rollover' animation'...Put a "stop();" action on the first keyframe, and whatever static graphics of the equipment you want on this frame. Then on the following frames put your animation of the name fading in or whatever.
Place this movieclip on the timeline and give it an instance name of equipmentMC or something like that.
Now you can have your invisible button trigger the animation in the frames.
on (release) {
animationMC.play();
}
You can get fancy and put rollOut actions, and fade out animations, but this is a pretty clean way to achieve what you are attempting.
My advice is not to mess with layer styles for buttons, just use an invisible button and you'll be fine.

[resdog]

You need to have the rectangle in the "Hit" state, not the "over" of the button, as that defines the clickable area. Here's what I would do:

Up state: nothing
Over state: Text with the name of the equipment
Down state: same as Over state.
Hit state: The rectangle symbol that covers the area you want to be clickable.

[transmit failure]

oops, yes the hit state.


*drinks more coffee

[follicle]

Thanks guys! I got it working. I really appreciate your help.