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:
