Well, the art brush is working and I think it’s in a good state to release. There’s a good chance I’m going to do more work on it eventually but I think it’s to a point where people will be able to use it productively. As another example of what you can do with this tool, I present the following eye candy that I knocked together real quick-like:
Pink and Ain't
Animation, Flash, and other nerdy ramblings
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Flash Art Brush Tool: It Works!
As I mentioned in a previous post, for years I’ve wished for the ability to use art brushes in Flash. I’ve found, though, through years of wishing and hoping followed by disappointment, that the Flash development team is very unlikely to add in new features that are likely to help me as an animator. They’re too focused on supporting Flash as an application development platform, not as an animation medium. I think on their list of priority customers, animators who target non-interactive media are near the bottom.
That’s a big reason why I started creating Flash extensions — to fill in the gaps that the Flash development teem is either unaware of or is unwilling to address. Well, a short time ago I realized that I could probably create a tool to perform one of my all-time wished-for features: art brushes. Illustrator’s had them for a long time. They’re very useful in there, and they would be similarly useful in Flash.
After about a week and a half of work, I’ve attained success! My art brush experiment has blossomed into an actual usable tool! It turned out significantly better than I had hoped, with fairly quick runtime (even before I’ve done any optimization) and very good visual results. It’s not quite ready to post for the general public but I’m interested in getting people to test it a bit and give me feedback — Tell me what new features it needs and let me know if you run into any bugs. If you’re interested, please let me know either in the comments or via email.
To give you a tantalizing taste of the possibilities, here are some actual examples of what my new Flash art brush tool can do:
Art Brushes Are Within My Grasp
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.
Virtual animation disc
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.
No Laurel-Resting
Today was a good day. Let me list a few of the reasons:
- Kung Fu Panda World went live. I’ve been working on this virtual world since January of Last year and it’s very satisfying to see it “ship”. This is also the first game I’ve shipped as an animator. Long ago I was a software engineer and I shipped one game while I worked at Treyarch Studios. Maybe you haven’t heard of it?
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