Challenging project. First I tried to create an animation using the IK shape and also IK with symbols on the same armature. (Doesn't work). Then I attempted an IK shape using an octopus with several tentacles. That didn't work as the illustration was imported from Illustrator. Probably having and IK shape with several connecting "worm-like" shapes is not possible. Finally I decided to create a walking unicorn. (Well, it was going to be galloping, but that is a rather difficult sequence of leg movements to capture. Walking finally came together.)
Having symbols in the IK armature was sort of confusing. You have to turn your shapes into symbols before you can create an armature and "put it through it's paces". But if you discover that your symbols need editing when "putting through paces" reveals funky shape issues at the joints, you can't go back and smooth them out. Kind of a catch-22. How can you know before creating un-editable symbol armatures that you may want to edit them once they are movable? If that makes sense at all. You can see on the back of the unicorn's upper legs, sharp angles point out in some positions when he's walking. At any rate, overall it works pretty well so that was a success.
The .mov file's too big to upload. in fact Flash wouldn't create a .mov file. Probably because the file is too large in memory size. Darn, it would be fun to share it. Some people made links to theirs. Hmm, how does that work?
The buttons weren't hard to create, but the Actionscript was a challenge. My "begin" button finally works, but I couldn't figure out how to make the stop button work. Not too sure if having the "begin" button functioning is an Actionscript mouseEvent or not, or if it's just basic Action Script. I didn't figure out how to add a stop in the last frame to stop the animation, either.
What I found is that the mov creation seems to want to start at the beginning of the timeline, and end when it runs to the end. This is great when you have a nice simple linear timeline, but if your stops somewhere in the middle, or never gets to the end without user input, then it will never complete.
ReplyDeleteI was able to work around that by specifying an amount of time to use to create the quicktime (that is in option in the publish settings I think). This might be what you are seeing as well.