Flash Animation 5: Creating a Complex Character with Movable Parts
Sunday July 20, 2008
One thing that's made Flash so popular as an animation program is the ability to "cheat" on animations. You can use tweens to set a start and end point, and leave the rest up to the program; you might think this wouldn't work for character animation, but it does. All you need to do is create your character in multiple parts, instead of drawing it all as one piece - with each limb separated out like a marionette's. Then you can play puppet-master all you want with the parts, by controlling each individual piece with its own tweens.
Comments
i will try this… create a new character
In ANY animation program which uses tweening, the key, as Adrien-Luc explains, is to ‘nest’ bodypart elements together in a meaningful order. (Think of the old, if anatomically-challenged song “The headbone’s connected to the neck bone”). In programs I use, this means using either some form of ‘bones’ (eg: Anime Studio Pro’) or some form of lockable pivots (eg: ‘Creatoon’). Without any way to nest or lock bodyparts together, when tweening is used, they will drift apart or (as with a program like ‘Artoonix’), you have to physically manipulate every limb-movement in every frame and that NEVER produces smooth animation. In that event, traditional cel-style work is better where you have to draw and re-draw complete figures every time.