Animation: hierarchic linking?

[Skaven252]

I tried making a quick Flash animation with Xara (see the attachment), but as you can see, the eyes' irises are not linked to the head, so they move from one frame to the next in a linear fashion.

Does Flash have a way to hierarchically link objects together, so that when a parent object moves/rotates, the child objects move/rotate with it (and can then move in relation to the parent object)?

If Flash does, has it been considered for Xara? (I ask this despite being fully aware that Xara is primarily intended for illustration, not animation)

[amoore]

I don't know about Flash per se. You may need something more specifically designed for that kind of things. Anime Studio (formerly known as Moho) is a good choice that isn't too expensive.

[Egg Bramhill]

Ditto. Flash doesn't have this linking either, so moho is your best bet.

You can get some quite complex fake linking in XXP but you need to think well ahead so you get it right first time because unlike Flash's library shapes, although XXP has named objects they're not editable in the way Flash library object are.

View the xar in wire frame to get a better idea of how the animation is constructed.

[pauland]

Ditto. Flash doesn't have this linking either, so moho is your best bet.

Err.. Flash does have the linking described by the OP.

Flash has the concept of a MovieClip. Think of it like a canvas. You can draw on the canvas, or nest another MovieClip within it (like pasting another canvas on top of it).

If you rotate or move the outer (first) MovieClip, all the nested Movieclips will be rotated or moved as well.

In canvas terms it's a bit like having a page with post-it notes attached. If you rotate the big canvas, all the stuck notes will rotate too AND you can move the notes on the canvas as well!

Paul
(Egg, I know you know about MovieClips)

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Paul,

I agree completely but Flash (to the best of my knowledge) doesn't have the ability to describe the path of the end of the hand and have the hand, fore arm and upper arm automatically follow the correct path as per linking which I assumed Skaven was talking about.

For example, I believe to get a hand to reach out to pick up a can of beer, in Flash you can't just describe the path of the hand and have Flash tween the linkages between the 2 limbs and 3 joints automatically. You need to reverse engineer them, thus the choice of Moho which does this automatically.

I've never done a lot of this type of animation in Flash and I could be completely wrong.

[Skaven252]

View the xar in wire frame to get a better idea of how the animation is constructed.

Thanks for the cool example! So the idea is to use invisible circles as guide objects, and create enough frames to ensure the objects follow (near-)circular paths.

My rolling smiley head would be pretty hard to make that way, though, since the object moves in addition to rotating.

[pauland]

Hi Paul,

I agree completely but Flash (to the best of my knowledge) doesn't have the ability to describe the path of the end of the hand and have the hand, fore arm and upper arm automatically follow the correct path as per linking which I assumed Skaven was talking about.

I think Skaven mentioned the children moving in response to the movement of the parent, which is what happens in Flash with nested MovieClips. For example, you move the shoulder and the rest of the arm moves too. It's known as forward kinematics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward...tic_animation).

Your interpretation is of the child moving and having the parents move in response to that. This is known as inverse kinematics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse...tic_animation). In this case you move the hand and the elbow and shoulder follow in response to the movement of the hand.

You are quite correct that Flash does not have such a feature built in.

I think we have just interpreted Skavens post differently.

Paul

[haakoo]

Hi,

Just imported your smiley into swishmax
adjusted the movement of the irises in less then 10 min,see result(1&2)
or group before animating(3)

Hans

[pauland]

That's painfull to look at. I'm assuming the onion skin effect is deliberate.

[Skaven252]

adjusted the movement of the irises in less then 10 min,see result(1&2)

What did you do? Did you create a huge number of keyframes and adjust the irises into the correct places in every frame? Man, that was a lot of work.

or group before animating(3)

... but if you do this, the irises cannot move in relation to the head. (the head, the mouth, and the eye whites were already grouped like this)