Cold Hard Council, Question #3
With the first and second editions of Cold Hard Council behind us, it’s time for… the thrilling third edition:
Name one 3rd-party plug-in you’d love to see built for Flash.
Non-vector style brushes would be my number 1. It would again help deflate the “flash” look and cut down on all the hassles of importing Photoshop
or Painter files when needed.
–Mike Geiger, Animation Director, ‘Yam Roll’
Not really a plug-in as much as I would like to see a true alpha channel quicktime exports. Beauty and mattes are fine but one less step would be great.
–Craig Hartin – Animation Supervisor, Radical Axis, ‘Squidbillies’
Some sort of camera I guess. I just want the damn instance box to hold more then two numbers!! They should integrate Toon Titan though, that’s a fantastic tool for colour.
–Gene Fowler, King of the Litter Box, Fatkat Animation Studios
Our animators would love to have certain things happen inside the software. We would like to be able to see the frame numbers in the timeline in real time while scrubbing dialogue. As it is now, you have to stop scrubbing to see which frame you are on. Another improvement we would like to see is the ability to click into symbols and still be on the same frame you were on outside of the symbol. We would rather see more initiative taken by Adobe/Macromedia to develop arrays of plug-ins that would tailor Flash to specific tasks. Even if offered for sale, they could give more functionality to people who had specific uses of the software whether it would be animation or web development.
–Brendan Burch & Dave Vamos, Founders, Six Point Harness Studios
Better brushes/drawing tools like in Illustrator. Better exporting tools for broadcast. Better color picker. A built-in sound editing tool. Better library/asset organization. Oh wait…that’s not just one….
–Roque Ballesteros, Founder, Ghostbot
I’d like to see various MPEG encoders built in as export functions.
–Sandro Corsaro, Creative Director, Crest Digital
–Co-Author, Hollywood 2D Digital Animation
The ‘Flash Plug-ins’ section of the boards have become the most active, and it’s this very topic that’s driving the attention.
July 20th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
I would like to see (now Flash is under Adobe’s wing) Flash and Illustrator merge into one product (calling it Flashtrator would be bad though).
July 20th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
How about some sort of joint skeleton system so it’s alot easier to animate broken-joint characters? Or have they already put that in newer versions?
July 20th, 2006 at 5:30 pm
If you’re suggesting some sort of bone system or IK, it’s underway in two camps – the most talked about being Reanimator…
July 20th, 2006 at 7:25 pm
There’s great textured-dry-brushes in Illustrator, simply put those into Flash, having the bitmap element could be very glitchy (like the current movieclip-blur filter method in Flash
so Photoshop style brushes could be a huge memory pig. But Illustrator-style fancy-brushes would be cool. I’d stay away from IK handles/joints and such, there are other programs for that if you want to achieve that style of character animation, stick with Flash for being the animator-friendly alternative for all the traditnal animators out there, more accurate frame count on dialogue scrubbing, better sound-editing tools, better and faster brushes and drawing tools, Flash 4 STILL has superior drawing abilities with the Wacom Tablet, let’s bring that back in Flash 9, so we can draw faster and smoother again!
-Ron Doucet Director: Olliver’s Adventures, Delilah & Julius, Johnny Test
July 20th, 2006 at 10:05 pm
When you have a library conflict, I would like for flash to show a list of the conflicting symbols. This way you can know right away weather or not to overwrite it.
July 21st, 2006 at 3:57 am
I’d like to see a vector based particle generator for creating effects for authortime animation
(graphics symbol clips… not action scripted movie clips)