Sunday, October 16, 2011

DMA205 - FBF Flash Animation

This assignment pressured me to use my problem solving skills. Though the assignment sounded extremely simple at first, I found myself stuck on countless occasions, and wound up having to take a step back and really think things through before proceeding to the next step, so as to minimize wasted time. For example, when I traced my character sketch for the first time on Adobe Illustrator and imported it into Flash, I quickly realized that I couldn't manipulate my vector character in Flash the way I had wanted to. To remedy this, I went back to my AI file and separated each limb into different layers. That way, when I put it back into flash, I could deal with each limb separately and assign a layer for each. This made it a whole lot easier to move my character's limbs into different poses without interfering with the rest of the character.



Separating the character into layers.


Separated and re-assembled.


The bone tool was giving me problems in flash. When I altered the limb too much, flash would lose it's anchors and start overlapping, causing a very messy product. To fix this, I simply created a new layer on top of each of my limbs and manually brushed over certain areas to clean it up a bit more.


This is the same leg, fixed with some brushwork.

The final animation can be viewed here:

http://dosedesigns.ca/dma205/doallenfbf.html