Pink and Ain't

Oh my goodness, I’m so close. You don’t even understand. For the last week or so I’ve been using all the spare time I could find to work on a new Flash command. It’s so complex that the source file is now more than 1000 lines. To put this in perspective, I’ve never seen any jsfl command that comes even close to this length, apart from my own autotweener. To put this further in perspective, this tool will do something that Flash has never been able to do, and for which I and many of my Flash animator friends have been clamoring as long as any of us has been using Flash.

Curious yet?  The tool that I’m working on will map arbitrary art onto an arbitrary path.  That means you can create “art brush” symbols and then apply them to any path and have the brush bend itself to follow the path.  For instance, if you’re animating a tiger with a wagging tail, you’d just animate a line, then apply your tiger tail art to your lines.  Boom, you’ve got a wagging, serpentine tiger tail.

I haven’t got the tool finished yet but I thought I’d put up an image to illustrate what I’m talking about.  The image below is from the Art Inspires blog (see the original post here).  It’s a screen capture from Adobe Illustrator, which has had this feature for a long time.  I’m kind of skeptical that I can make my art brushes look as good as Illustrator’s, and it will certainly be slower (since it’s written in Javascript), but either way it’s going to be awesome.  Seriously, this is sharks with frickin’ lasers territory.

I mentioned in my last post that I was working on a new Flash command that several people had requested, and that I’d like to have myself.  It feels good to be able to help people out with stuff like this, particularly when it also helps me   Anyway, I thought I’d talk about it a little.

Several graphics programs, particularly ones that deal with animation, have a feature where you can rotate the canvas to an arbitrary angle, in the same manner as an animation disc.  It’s very useful when you can’t get quite the right curve to a line unless your drawing is positioned at a good angle.  Unfortunately, Flash won’t do that.

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For the folks who aren’t Flash animators but would like to see a little bit of my process when animating, skip down and watch the movie that I link to below.  Starting at around 4 minutes in you can see an example of how I animate one of my characters in a simple motion.

Anyone who’s followed my blog so far and read the entries on Flash commands (not sure if there’s anyone like that yet – I have an admittedly small audience) will have seen me mention the Autotweener.  Well, today’s the day – I’m going to tell you all about it and post it for download.

The autotweener is a tool that does many of the same things as Flash’s built-in motion and shape tween functions, but it works in a fundamentally different way.  It’s incredibly useful, simplifying tasks that used to be difficult or impossible.  For my own animation process it was revolutionary – it totally changed how I do things.  I now rarely use motion tweens and even more rarely shape tweens – the autotweener has taken over almost all the tasks I used to use those for.

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So I’ve noticed a couple things.  First, most people who use Flash are either animators or programmers, but rarely both.  There are lots of animators who dabble in programming and lots of programmers who dabble in animation, but in my experience you’re likely to have much more passion about one than the other, leading to having much more skill and experience in that one as well.

The reason I mention this is that occasionally I think about how few people there are who produce decent JSFL commands.  I think it’s because the people who are really interested in Flash commands are the animators – particularly the professionals, who work in Flash every day.  It’s certainly true for me: I animate in Flash for 45 to 50 hours a week, and I frequently think of things that I wish Flash could do.  Earlier in my career, before I Knew the Way of the JSFL, I would just grumble to myself and go on working around that lack-of-feature or bug.  Unfortunately I think that’s what most Flash animators do, many of them not even being aware of the purpose of the Commands menu.

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