References for Monday's Class

Here are the best tutorials I've been able to dig up on using armatures in Flash CS4. The first is a good intro to the basics, and the six embedded tuts get into the nitty gritty of creating a fully articulated puppet of a person.

"Create a Simple Inverse Kinematics Animation with Flash CS4," by Lee Brimelow, for Layers magazine:

http://www.layersmagazine.com/create-a-simple-inverse-kinematics-animation-with-flash-cs4.html

Matt Maxwell's six-part tutorial:













As I said in class, I find the bone tool a little buggy, but here are some tips that, I've found, make creating a jointed Flash "puppet" a little more effective.



Firstly, as shown in the tutorials above, you need to make an extra symbol at the sternum, which will act as a branching-off point to connect the shoulders and the neck.

This seems to be the best sequence for creating the armature:

1. Start at the waist, connecting the waist to the two hips.

2. Connect the wast to the torso, then the sternum.

3. Finish connecting the legs to the hips.

4. From the sternum, connect the arms, then the neck and head.

Make sure joint rotation is disabled for the two bones going from sternum to shoulder.

Once you start keyframing your puppet, it can be difficult to manipulate the puppet back into a neutral starting point -- when you start copying the armature, you end up copying your whole string of keyframes. For this reason, it's a good idea to save your puppet in a single-frame fla, in a neutral pose, separate from the fla you are creating your animation in. You can cut and paste the neutrally posed armature into various scenes in your animation fla, so that you're not pasting whole layers of keyframe poses that have to be readjusted.

Moving your puppet across the stage, through space, can induce all kinds of buggy distortions. The "cleanest" way to move your character through space is to animate the character moving in one place, then copying and pasting that animated armature into a new symbol, and moving that symbol across the stage. This can prove difficult when there is a lot of interaction between the puppet and its environment, because you have to anticipate the movements of the character before you position it in its final spot in the environment.

I've had some luck moving the character through space by selecting the armature, then hitting command-A (for "select all") and moving the character by grabbing it with the free transform tool (the third tool in the toolbar).