Playing around with Bones

It's often said in some circles, the best way to learn something is to teach it. Yesterday I was confronted by having to teach something that only appeared 10 days ago. This was the poor, but respectable result.

Timing is all over the place. Joints are not in the right place really, but passable...

This is using the new (old) IK or Bones feature.

What you do is a number of Flash symbols, link them together with "Bones" and then when you move one part of the model. the other parts move in sympathy.

It's called inverse kinematics.

It's a process that allows more, and simpler naturalistic animation.
This is the structure I added using the Bones. Since this was the first time I'd ever used them, I didn't realise that the way I had done it, the shoulder would articulate from the heart and not the shoulder.

This then required careful use when I tried to animate it.

Next time I'll add far more hinge points and also restrict their movement so things like feet can't turn upside down.

Below is a screenshot of the arm moving. All I did was to drag the hand and the rest obediently follows.

The other thing, which I knew, but didn't do because this was just messing' was to prepare by producing a storyboard with the all important timings on them.

This would have prevented the animation looking a bit lazy when he's supposed to be zooming off into the sky.

For the flying sequence, I did a screenshot, the one here, resized it, flipped it and then did a loop the loop motion tween.

The background is a bit of rust I found in Google.


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