Filed under Flash Process …

Feb 24 2010
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Flash Process, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Rant

Please Make Flash Rock

I’m looking forward to Flash CS5.  Let me rephrase that.  I’m hopeful for what CS5 could be.  On the other hand, that’s been true of every release of Flash since MX 2004.  They promise these great new features, but rarely do they address the real nagging problems.

CS4 introduced quite a few bugs and annoyances, though the UI rewrite also fixed a bunch of issues that have bugged me ever since I started using Flash.  You should see the list of bugs and feature requests I’ve assembled.  I’ve submitted them all to Adobe’s bug report / feature request web form, but I have real doubts about how much they pay attention to that.

There was a feature that I used fairly often when I worked on Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends that disappeared in version 8: copying vector art from Flash to Illustrator.  I have no idea why they would have taken that out, since it was so useful to us on Foster’s.  The most common thing we would use it for would be to take some art that we had in Flash, bring it into illustrator, and either create an art brush out of it or apply an art brush to it.  This would make things like animating a complex striped tiger tail as easy as animating a standard Flash line.  Translation: very easy.  It was even used once (before I came onto the show) to animate an entire character – a particularly gangly and clumsy one.

Here’s my dream, though: make it so I don’t even need Illustrator.  Add art brushes to Flash.  Wouldn’t that rock?  It would potentially create very high vertex counts but it would be amazing in terms of versatility.  And, having my foundation firmly in TV animation, what do I care about vertex counts?  As long as the renderer can handle it without crashing I’m good.

And while you’re at it, add trapezoidal transformation of symbols, smarter shape tweens, and any number of other things that Illustrator does so much better but belong in an animation program like Flash.  Make my wish come true, Adobe: make Flash rock for animators!

Aug 03 2006
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Character design, Don't Fear the Sitter, Flash Process

Hot Hot Mom

mom front viewI’ve been working for the last few days on the Mom model and tonight I finished the front view. Mostly. I realized right at the end that I really should add in some jewelry — particularly some dangly diamond earrings. She’s supposed to be a classy trophy wife on her way to the opera or some other high-class function, so of course she’d have some diamonds. Now the next trick is to figure out how to make a diamond sparkle in Flash. I’ve got some ideas. We’ll see if they work.

I discovered recently that the fine folks at Macromedia introduced a rather annoying bug into Flash 8. When copying from Flash 8 to (apparently) any other vector-based drawing program some or all of the control points are lost. The practical upshot is that copying from Flash into Illustrator is impossible. This is a major problem, since one of the tricks I use when animating in Flash is to copy an object into Illustrator and then apply an art brush to give it a nice variable-thickness line. If you watch Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends closely you’ll see that we do that all the time. Virtually all the lines on the characters were done with art brushes. We also do it a little more overtly sometimes, even using a charater’s whole boy as a brush so we can really control them. You can see an example of this on the episode “Frankie My Dear,” which has a whole sequence where a tall pillar-like character is wobbling all over the place.

So what am I to do? I was kicking myself for having made the move to Flash 8 without fully testing my process in the new software. Then, on a whim, I looked at the “save as” dialog box. Oh! It turns out I can save my Flash 8 files back to Flash MX 2004 (the previous version) as long as I didn’t use any of the new features (which I didn’t on my turnarounds, the most important files when it comes to creating new scenes). So I’ve officially downgraded back to Flash MX 2004. That’s what we use at work anyway, so maybe this’ll provide more of a consistent experience for me.

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