Comments on: Bone Up on the Brand New Flash CS4

By: pinstripes

pinstripes — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:13:36 +0000

The new tools (tweens and bones) are useless if you need to swap frames inside a graphic symbol, as 99% of character animators do. I was so excited to start working with these new tools. I feel like I paid $600 to upgrade my suite and the only really useful feature I got in return was the rotating canvas in photoshop.

By: Super8mm

Super8mm — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 07:19:58 +0000

Flash has IK… fine, but here’s the compromise… Anything with bones cannot have animated frames meaning that graphics and movie clips can be tossed around with bones but cannot have a time line, even if they do, a movie clip can only show frame one. Once your graphics are boned you’ll have to destroy all the bones to modify your graphics. You cannot copy and paste bones either, so forget that idea. You cannot animate a individual bone’s scale. For bone dynamics, it has only a speed selector and it didn’t seem to do much but I’ll have to try it some more. You cannot mask directly a bone animation, you cannot copy frames of a bone animation. Each bone influences points, there is a default setting but if you select which points to be influenced. Again, fine… except the actual points are barely seen from all the gigantic thick outline shapes that indicate which point are selected and not selected, If only the line thickness of the indicators didn’t scale when zoomed in would help that much more. With triangles and squares all over the place when there’s a complex shape it can turn into a big mess that you can’t see anything or select anything. And another thing if the shape is too complex it just says “I can’t do it it’s too complicated” …nice!

You can convert the bone animation into frame by frame stills then you can do as you wish… Quite disappointing.

By: Flash CS4 - IK, BONES!, Inverse Kinematics! « Mindspasm’s Development Blog

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 03:52:04 +0000

[...] into my current model. Hoping they can, because I watched a few of the animation videos, and it looks pretty darn sweet. Characters with MANY different variations, that are posable, and can take 3d transformations sounds [...]

By: Milo

Milo — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 19:16:25 +0000

Hey Aaron! Thanks for the tip! I was wondering if you could go through the whole process of rigging a character some point? Or if you know where I can see that done? It seems to work great for one piece of art but when I try to do a whole character it’s difficult to figure out what goes first.

By: inj culbard

inj culbard — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:43:06 +0000

ooooh. Exciting times!

By: Adobe Flash CS4 Professional is Shipping | Cold Hard Flash: Flash Animation News, Videos and Links

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:26:25 +0000

[...] latest version of Flash is officially shipping. Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, which was announced a few weeks back, is now on sale for $699 USD ($199 upgrade) as a stand-alone product, or as part of a product [...]

By: Patach

Patach — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:45:07 +0000

Something unrelated, but a question. Wanted to know about the Brush capability for CS4, is it finally customizable like in Illustrator?

By: David Nethery

David Nethery — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 12:58:54 +0000

Interesting. I liked it in Moho (Anime Studio) to animated simple actions and nice to see it being finally rolled out in Flash. Does anyone know if Flash CS 4 finally has a rotating canvas ? ("virtual animation disc" like in TVPaint or ToonBoom) I heard that Photoshop CS 4 has full rotating canvas , so I would hope the integrated that feature into Flash also for those who want to use Flash to do traditional style animation drawn frame-by-frame.

By: Andymator

Andymator — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:58:35 +0000

Mick is absolutely right.

A tip to guys who want to animate awesome elephant trunks; learn how to draw them. Repeatedly.

By: SomeBody

SomeBody — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:36:23 +0000

The bone tool is not as easy to use as it looks. It’s kind of a pain in the butt to work with. But it’s still an improvement.