pasithea

So...

I finally started my Flash animation class although the quarter started a month ago. I hadn't been able to pay for classes right away and thusly couldn't log-in to the class. Anyhow, I'm all caught up now and learned some pretty neat things along the way.
A lot of 'learning' in Flash seems like 'Workaround to Bugs' from my point of view. For instance. shape hinting is a really neat tool. You can ptu keypoints on your shape so that it morphs into another shape the way you want it to... But figuring out how many suggestions to put on an object and where to put them is a totally different issue. What's more, there's no rhyme or reason to the way it does shape morphs. If you draw a stroke arced up from left to right, then morph it to another stroke arced down that you also drew from left to right, 2 times out of 3 it will morph it correctly and the other time it will do it backwards, making the line fold in on itself as start-point A becomes endpoint B. You have to use between 2 and 4 shape hints to make it behave.
Lots of other weird things like that. I did, however, find myself with a real advantage having taken and understood Maya before taking Flash. There's a topic never talked about in Flash that is integeral to Maya that I've found makes me make better Flash animations than would otherwise be possible.
That thing is Parenting (Or in the case of Flash, converting things to symbols) Take the case of the bouncing ball. If you were to approach this in Flash in the form of making a circle, dragging it some distance and possibly shape-deforming it, you'd be hand-setting about 80% of the animation as keyframes, and that's for each ball you have. BUT... What I did was I created a black and white ball as a symbol (using a gradient on a circle) then I did the up-and-down motion of the ball bouncing using 3 keyframes and an ease-to/ease-from. Then I created a new symbol with this symbol in it and set 3 more keys for the stretch and squash of my ball (by stretch and squashing the imported symbol) On the next symbol I applied a tint to set the color of my ball. From there all I had to do on my stage was set the start and end positions of my ball's motion.

http://circle.twu.net/School/balls.html is an example of the finished thing. (The elasticity of the ball isn't quite perfect but that's because I haven't cleaned it up yet)

The red ball is made with keyframes set by hand. It took a long time to do and is not really very good. the blue ball is an example of the level 3 symbol. Just the move and bounce with eases, and the coloring. The gold ball is an example of moving and scaling the level 3 symbol. I should also have added an alpha to this to make it come out of the mist. all in all, for Flash I think it's not a bad example of animation.

The second assignment for this class was the shape morphing. I drew part of my curve wrong but basically it works and I enjoy this. Will have to do more with it. http://circle.twu.net/School/candle.html 4 keyframes and 6 shape hints to get pretty good S-curve animation (except for the part where I drew the wrong curve because I was sleepy for one key)