Flash question

[Brian_Rice]

I'm getting a draw-on laptop shipped to me in a few days, so I wanted to finally take a look at flash and see what I could do quickly just using the mouse.

I've gotten the basics down, but I'm wondering if anyone knows if it's possible to exchange an "asset", "symbol", whatever within a rigged system.

For instance with this animation, I'd wanted to move the arm and hand as a rigged piece, but obviously I needed to change the animations of the hand, which I couldn't do once the arm was rigged (because it essentially becomes a new layer), so instead I just went for a static arm and animated hand (could have animated the arm, obviously, but the rigging business had me frustrated so I just did this quick so I could go to bed).

The only workaround I can think of is to rig several identical arms with different hands and then exchange out the arms during the course of the animation.

I know Toon Boom lets you interchange things on rigs during the animation, but I'd rather keep everything AE if possible just for workflow purposes (that, and it's already paid for).

Thanks!

 

[Jordan Scott Price]

I think I see what you mean.

The only solution I've ever used:

• Make the arm a symbol (e.g. arm_lft)
• Go inside arm_lft symbol
• Make a new layer and drop the hand symbol in there
• Create your keyframes for the arm movements that you want and motion tween the hand to the necessary positions at the end of the forearm to keep the limb in tact

The other solution would be to make the arm-hand vector all one symbol, and inside the symbol just the arm parts would be on one layer and the hand parts on another layer. Then you could set keyframes for each animation for the hand and the arm individually all inside the symbol. This saves you from having to motion tween the hand and then going inside the hand to change around keyframes; it also keeps you from having a symbol inside a symbol, which can sometimes be problematic. The downside to this system is if you were to ever want access to just the hand part or just the arm part, they are not saved individually as symbols, so you will not be able to drag them from your library.

It's tedious (like everything in Flash), and you will have to do this for every possible arm-hand combination.

The other solution is to use bones (if you're in CS5), which uses a parent-child system of rigging, like 3D inverse kinematics. Although, it's somewhat buggy (like everything in Flash).

 

[Brian_Rice]

Using CS4.

Happy someone who "flashes" replied to this -- because I'm having another issue that I just can't seem to find a solution for.

Basically I have drawings created in photoshop. Let's call them "assets". A leg, an arm, a torso, etc. I've no problem getting these assets into flash, converting them to symbols, animating them, etc -- but the friggin bone tool refuses to work with them. I've tried everything I can think of to try and rig the images, but for whatever reasons it's just not jiving.

For me it would be insane to not use the bone tool as much as possible because it's, ya know -- awesome.

You have any luck with this? Any ideas?

 

[craigbowman]

Press the F1 key or go to the "Help"menu and choose "Flash Help" and the default browser window should open. Then in the upper right hand corner replace the word "Search" with "bone tool" and click on the search magnifying glass icon. You'll be presented a tutorial on how to use the bone tool.

 

[Jordan Scott Price]

Press the F1 key or go to the "Help"menu and choose "Flash Help" and the default browser window should open. Then in the upper right hand corner replace the word "Search" with "bone tool" and click on the search magnifying glass icon. You'll be presented a tutorial on how to use the bone tool.

Have you used Flash for character animation? It is almost never that easy. And Bones add just as many complications in Flash as they do benefits.

 

[Brian_Rice]

Ho-kay, found what I was looking for regarding the rigging issue, and unfortunately I found it in an article talking about "how things can be improved." Basically you can't add bones to an image and have the image morph. That's a ginormous bummer as I'm more interested in the bones morphing the drawings than I am for the more traditional approach of interlocking different assets/symbols.

So, ugh -- what's the workaround?

It seems like such a simple task -- 1) create images in photoshop, 2) rig the image in flash. But the only way I can rig an image from photoshop in flash is if I rig it as a static symbol with other static symbols.

Flash seems to have a few workarounds that I can, ya know, work with, but this one is an icy brick wall of cruelness. I wanted to make costumes for my characters using Photoshop, and now I'm stuck using cruddy flash for all of the morphing character art work. Not cool. Heck, even Crazy Talk allows you to morph images. Maybe I'll just have to suck it up and buy it.



The ooooonly thing I can think of is to do a torso rig the old fashioned way using a photoshop picture in two sections (chest and waist) and then rig the legs and arms to the torso rig and then fill the arms and legs with *patterns* made in photoshop via after effects in post.

So...

1) Static fringe, chest and waist + morph(able) rigged neck/head, arms and legs.

2) Legs and arms are filled with bright green.

3) Take animation into AE and fill/key arms and legs with premade photoshop image that matches the chest and waist piece?

That's the only workaround I can think of. That way you'd still get the morphing arms and legs and could still have *something* near a morphing PS image.

Really doesn't need to be that hard. lol

I'll see if I can make it work.

 

[Jordan Scott Price]

You would be best off moving to something like ToonBoom as fast as possible. I spent 3 months on a 2-minute animation in Flash, hand-drawing the keyframes. No tweens or bones. I got the look I wanted, but it was exceptionally tedious. (And I don't want to hear from anyone, "that's how it was done in the old days." I'm using a computer for a reason; I just chose the wrong program.)

 

[Brian_Rice]

Really?

See my problem is that there are things I like about Toon Boom, things I like about Anime Studio Pro and things I like about Crazy Talk -- but maybe the reason I like all the things that I like isn't because they're better, just faster.

Everytime I research these different programs I always come back to flash feeling like it in some ways is still ahead of the pack.

While crazy talk has a pretty wicked face mainp, to me the lip sync isn't that great. It's passable, but I've found myself taken out of the moment because the lip sync has just seemed...off.

Toon boom, to my knowledge, doesn't have morphing capabilities. And without morph you're either stuck doing frame by frame or separate interlocking assets/symbols like we talked about before.

Most people say Toon Boom is the way to go, but unless it has symbol morphing with its bone rig, to me it's not what I want it to be.

Anyway, this is a super rough-out of what I'm thinking as a workaround. The torso section wasn't designed to move (no additional meat added under the cage, etc), it's just a design drawing cut in half. When I do the actual uniform It'll be like to eggs on top of one another to compensate for the slight movements in the middle there.

Hopefully I can try keying things in tomorrow to see if it'll actually work. My gut tells me that this is how Jazzastudios achieved a similar effect in "Larry episode 1.5" with the arms of the French guards.

Also, if you haven't checked out the Larry vids, they are literally the most awesome flash stuff done by a single animator I've ever seen. Love, love, love them. Here's 1.5 where you can see the arm movement and what I *think* is a keyed-in image on the arms.

Ooooh...unless he simply deleted the color there (whatever it was) and had a background layer of the silver mesh. Hmmmm. That would explain why it almost looks like the mesh pattern is staying still while the arms are moving "through" it.

Hmmm....

 

[Jordan Scott Price]

That animation looks great.

It can and has been done, but character animating in Flash is tedious and not user-friendly.

The reason I mention moving away from it is because Flash is simply not meant for character animation. CS5 and the Bone tool were the first steps toward it, but Flash is still primarily meant for very simple tweens and for export to the web or small delivery. ToonBoom, etc., are made for character animation. Even if they're not great now, they will only improve because they are in the field of character animation, unlike Flash.

 

[Brian_Rice]

Hmm. I see what you're saying. I'll take another look at Toon Boom and Crazy Talk. In the meantime, though, I'll continue at least cutting my teeth on flash.

 

[Jordan Scott Price]

Don't get me wrong. It's great to know how to work Flash and, more importantly, how to work around its many, many problems. It can lead to jobs.

It's no mystery why most animation houses create their own software: Pixar uses Marionette; DreamWorks uses Emo.

Two-D animation houses often use mostly hand-drawn workflows, with computers used for frame blending, compositing, effects, etc., etc. That's why there really isn't a 2D "standard" as strong as, say, Maya, which Blue Sky Studios (Ice Age, Robots, Rio) uses. So it's best to become exceptionally skilled with one or two 2D-animating programs.

 

[Brian_Rice]

Here's another example of the warp bone tool that I just did. Again just quick and dirty, but you can see how it's such a massively important piece of the puzzle (at least for me).

Like you mentioned, though, the workarounds are pretty intense. I've pretty well given up on any hope of rigging anything as a complete piece if there are multiple armatures (rigs) involved. It's pretty much just about moving individual layers. Obviously the old school flash way is pretty simple to group things and then do a motion tween (with all of your keyframes already set up between the frames on the symbols), etc. But once those bones are rigged (morph style and so on different layers), each piece has to come along separately -- which isn't the end of the world, it's just annoying.

The real sickening part in all of it, though, is still the lack of being able to use the morph bone tool on an image. There's not going to be any real workaround for it, so basically I'll have two choices for uniforms, either A) Go "armor" style which would be like what I mentioned previously wherein the chest and torso slide as individual objects like old school flash, or B) get super creative in AE by keying out colors and replacing them with patterns (or maybe even a fluid image) inside the character. I don't think a combination would really suffice, but I'm still going to give it a go.

Like I said, though, I just started learning the program this weekend in preparations to receive my draw-on laptop, so maybe I'll still come up with more workarounds.

 

[Jordan Scott Price]

If you just picked it up this week, I'd say you're doing pretty well.

Once you get your tablet and start using a stylus, though, you might find it far more enriching drawing the individual movements by hand, keyframe to keyframe. It's how it's done in the 2D cinema world, and it really is a blast. Combine that skill with AfterEffects, and you are talking about a potentially beautiful, naturally-appealing animation.

 

[Brian_Rice]

If you just picked it up this week, I'd say you're doing pretty well.

Once you get your tablet and start using a stylus, though, you might find it far more enriching drawing the individual movements by hand, keyframe to keyframe. It's how it's done in the 2D cinema world, and it really is a blast. Combine that skill with AfterEffects, and you are talking about a potentially beautiful, naturally-appealing animation.

My plan is to do a mix. In the end, 12fps can equal quite a few drawn and colored images. I'm putting together a short Xmen script wherein I'll have a couple hand-drawn moments, but any sort of dialog scene I'll probably go the flash route. Right now I just want to get a walk cycle using a combination of old school flash and morph-style. It's ridiculous how much fore-thought has to be put into just doing something as simple as a walk cycle.

For instance, once you have a rigged vector image, you can't change its size until after you turn it into a symbol. So if you created an arm for your character and that arm doesn't fit perfectly, if it's already rigged you're screwed. Additionally, once you turn it into a symbol you can't utilize the rig and, obviously, whatever animation you've done is now fixed in that symbol. It's not a huge deal, but when you don't think every little detail out in advance it can result in a lot of wasted work.

I was working on a head/neck/torso last night for a walk cycle that I'd wanted to do today, was careful about putting all of the items (including colors) in the layer's "folder" so as to not have an inumerable amount of layers (and because an armature can only exist with things on a single layer). I thought I was being all smart until I realized that in order to actually get into the layer's "folder" I'd had to turn that layer into a symbol. And, of course, you can't multi-rig a single symbol (and you can't rig a symbol to a multi-rig), you can only rig symbols to other symbols or vectors within vectors. Big duh -- and it also meant that I had to scrap the entire piece (which wouldn't be a big deal if done with a stylus, but with a mouse it's a pain).

So in the end I had to choose -- head/neck/torso w/o animateable eyes, mouth, et al, VS symbol head w/ neck/torso vector multi-rig. In the end I felt that I'll be able to get the squish and stretch from the neck that I want without making the head a part of the multi-rig. And what's most important is the torso having that morphing ability.

So the rig for the walk cycle should consist of Symbols: HEAD, HANDS and FRINGE; Multi-rig Vectors: ARMS, LEGS/FEET and TORSO/NECK.

To me this will be the set-up that isn't being utilized in flash by most people but what I think is the purpose of the multi-rig and why it was invented. Not sure I'll be able to get it done in one day, but once it's finished I'll be sure to post. This'll be my first real go at making a character in flash (and, for now, I'm abandoning my PS to Flash ideas, saving them for a later piece or perhaps scrapping the idea all together and instead just doing filters in AE, which stinks for costuming, but it is what it is).