Case 02 - Animation

In this case our task was to animate our character. It had to be animated so it can run to the right, left and start a jump.

After the lab class last thursday(17/9/09) I started working on the animations. The lab class were pretty informative, just enough for the basic. Such as setting up our character for animation, tweens, anchorpoints, bone tool and ect. Their video tutorials they linked to on fronter.com were quite handy.
I also used various tutorials on internet and books to figure out how I should animate. Look at the bottom of this post for list of resources.

I joined some people from my class and people from the 2nd year classes LAN evenings, there we worked on our animations, helped each other solving various problems we had with flash and shared some tips.
Arranging evening such as this really helps, and its also alot more fun than figuring out everything on your own.

I ended up using the bone tool and motion tween, and this is the results.
To make a run cycle and ect. that goes left I just flipped the animations, so I didn't bother posting them here since they look pretty much the same.

Animating in flash ain't easy, but not hard either. I had some issues with flash while animating, wierd behaviour and "random stuff" happening almost all the time. Especially the bone tool like to mess things up. Their anchorpoints tend to move around, resulting in missplaced symbols/"limbs".
Allthough, I think the results ended up ok, nothing superfancy but they will do their job. There will probably be some more animations and tuning before the finished game.

Resources:
Fronter tutorial - Fra animasjon på scenen til symbol
Fronter tutorial - Hvordan sette sammen en "Sprite"
Fronter tutorial - Horisontal flipping av animasjon i en sprite
heyflash.com - Flash CS4 Tutorial - Animation (walk cycle and bone tool)
How to cheat in Adobe Flash CS4, Chris Georgenes - Chapter 4: Motion tips and tricks