Animations

[StormINK]

OK. This isn't Flash 9 specific but I figured this was the best place to ask. I have a pretty good basic understanding of Flash but animations have pretty much escaped me.

I'm just wondering... I know basic animations are easily made with tweens (like transitions and stuff...).

BUT! I was wondering... for more advanced animations do people actually draw out every frame like old school animators or are there other shortcuts? Cuz I can't seem to wrap my head around how some complex animations are made unless people took 1 year to draw out every frame.

Sorry if its a really noob question... I need some way to break into making complex animations and I can't really figure out how these people do these insane things. Thanks!

[lika]

Hi,
This is sandy,animation is mostly used in all over industry,mostly in film industry,it is used in building planing.
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sandy
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[dan_hin]

Good question!

What sort of advanced animation are you talking about? Frame by frame in Flash is probably a bad idea as you'll probably be importing a series of bitmaps...you'd be better off using After Effects and exporting your animation as an .flv, or dare I say it, using Director **awaits flames**

As with most animation, it's often easier to break down what you want to do into a series of steps.

Movieclips in Flash help you to do this; for example, if i wanted to animate a car moving, i might have 1 movieclip for the whole car, then within that I'd have two movieclips, one for each wheel.

This would mean that the wheels could rotate independantly of each other and the Car, but as they're contained within the main Car movieclip, you don't have to animate their position relative to the flash window.

Hope that helps to explain things a little bit for you. If you mean something more complicated than this (for example a growing, "flourishing" flower - that's something which is done by animating a mask to reveal an image.

Dan

[Jawnee]

Dan is spot on. I'm a newb myself but in working through animation examples from the new Flash books I recently purchased it seems like you can do a lot of really cool things using motion tweens, shape tweens, and masks all by breaking the animated object into it's simplest components and animated them individually. (The car example was actually in the book I'm reading now) My take on the entire animation in Flash concept is that as far as basic animations go you can do a lot with the tools I just mentioned, but if you are an animator and want to create really awesome flash cartoons or something of that nature there's no substitute for frame by frame animation. You don't have to use a series of bitmaps. You can draw everything in Flash! :D