Alan Camilo’s Flash plugins at trickorscript.com have taken the character animation world by storm. Out of the box, Flash is relatively animator-friendly, but with plugins the software becomes more tailored to the exact needs of the animator.

His latest offering is Bone Parenting, which released today. With a price tag of $29.99 USD, artists can create IK puppets that act like paper dolls. Camilo is also offering a 20-day free trial.

Artists who use Flash to move pose-to-pose may not find a great deal of use in this tool, but so often the software is used to animate stock model characters, re-using the same core set of symbols over and over. For this style of production, Bone Parenting would be a time-saver of immense proportions.

Also – keep your eyes glued here for another plugin that Camilo is working on. You won’t be disappointed.

Brazilian-based TrickOrScript.com has unveiled a series of Flash animation plug-ins. Animators use Flash software in a very specific way, and there’s functionality and repetitive tasks that are unique to our work flow. TrickOrScript.com zeroed in on some of the major ones, including ‘squash and stretch,’ a thumbnail viewer, and an interesting take on motion paths.

Link spotted on the Fatkat Animation blog.

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Dave Wolfe seems bent on solving all of our Flash animation headaches. Every time I turn around, he’s posting a new link to a free JSFL plugin. Thankfully, he’s created a website, Toonmonkey, to host his creations, and there’s several new ones that weren’t included in my post about his work back in March.

Included are (right click and ‘save as’):

Toggle Outline – allows you quickly be more selective about turning on and off the outline function for each layer.

FrameEDIT – When doing character animation it’s not uncommon to have a symbol that contains all the elements of the head and face, and many animators will nest the facial animation within this symbol. When you double-click a symbol to edit the nested animation, Flash always rewinds the timeline to frame 1. This command remembers which frame you were on when you edit it.

Merge Layers – Merge Layers will merge unlocked layers into a single layer. If you select a range of frames, only unlocked layers in that range will be merged. Be warned that when dealing with selected ranges of frames, all unlocked layers for that range will be merged, not just the selected layers.

There’s been what seems like a surge of Flash plug-in news lately (or perhaps I’m just paying more better attention), and today we’ll have a look at 4G Software’s two offerings.

3DCam ($49.95) – seems akin to After Effects’ 3D camera, which can also be found in other vector software like ToonBoom. Allows for multi-plane type camera moves – a functionality that’s been on wish-lists of many a Flash animator. The 4G website offers a slew of demos that look pretty cool.

LayerEX ($29.95) – this plug-in allows Flash animators to be more selective and precise when exporting to SWFs, PNGs and Quicktime files. Seems like it allows for the exporting of in and out points on renders (like After Effects) and it may act as a ‘bridge’ between Flash and After Effects with it’s ability to render out each layer of a file individually.

If anyone’s been using these, please post your review. I haven’t tinkered with either yet.

Dave Wolfe has taken matters into his own hands. Dave is an LA-based Flash animator whose gone and created three Flash extensions, or custom commands, that he’s offering to the Flash community for free. After spending some time last week at Flashforward, it’s become all too clear that the Dave Wolfe’s and the Warren Fuller’s of the world are going to advance the software for our community FAR more than the guys at Adobe/Macromedia. That’s not to say that the advances in Flash 8 aren’t interesting and somewhat useful, but we’re just never going to get the type of detailed animation-specific tools from a development team that’s more focused on interactive websites.

So with that said, here’s Dave’s extensions. You’ll need to have Macromedia’s Extension Manager 1.6 or later to install (which comes with Flash 8, but earlier versions need to download). Once you download these, you just double-click the mxp files (the three below) in Extension Manager and off you go. Dave recommends that you tinker with your keyboard shortcuts once you install, because there’s a bug in Flash that screws these up when you install custom commands. Just open the keyboard shortcut panel and click ‘OK.’ The shortcuts should go back to their proper places.

(right-click or control-click on these and ‘save as’)1. LayerColor – This will let you change the outline color for selected layers all at the same time instead of changing the color one at a time in the layer properties panel.

2. NewAnimClip – This will create a new empty symbol on a new layer, registered to the stage. If you have an animation clip for a character and you decide you want to nest it inside a symbol, the old way would be to copy all the frames, insert a new symbol, paste the frames, then drag that symbol onto the stage and try to line it up. With this extension, all you have to do is copy or cut the frames, run the NewAnimClip command, and then paste the frames. The symbol is already on the stage and correctly registered.

3. Tween2Keys – This works like ‘convert to keyframes,’ but it does it on two’s instead of one’s. You have to be careful with this one, as Dave tried to come up with a way to make it actually create keyframes on every other frame, but each way he came up with to do that ruined the motion tween. So what this actually does is use Flash’s convert to keyframes command first, then it removes any tweens, then it clears every other keyframe. Since you’re physically removing keyframes there is the potential to accidentally clear a keyframe that you want, so make sure that any of the selected frames do not have keyframes on 1′s or they will get cleared. To convert your tween to two’s, select the first keyframe and last keyframe in the motion tween (this will work for multiple layers) and run the command. For large amounts of frames it may take a few seconds for the script.

These are all accessed from the Commands menu in Flash MX 2004 or 8, and you can assign a keyboard shortcut to them from the Edit menu.

Great work, Dave. I’m assuming the audience will have plenty of ideas for your next batch of extensions. Evan Spiridellis and I recently challenged the Macromedia team to create a Warp Symbol tool (might work like a ‘Smart Object’ in Photoshop CS2), but perhaps that can happen by way of an extension. Or what about a global color palette that would allow for asset-specific color. Or the ability to build custom line types – so many Flash teams do this stuff in Illustrator, and I hear it’s possible to build these right into Flash itself. Anyone else?