Animating a human in Flash

any simple way?

[kiwanji]

I have a small (getting larger) pet project I have been working on in which I want to have a human shape animated walking around and picking objects up. Other than animating this frame by frame (which from what I understand will make the file size huge), is there any way to animate this idea? I have seen sites where someone animates whole sequences with stick figures (pretty much all I want) and unless they found a good way to do this it must have taken them decades to do each key frame.

I search FlashKit and no luck. :(

Thanks a bunch-

Scott

[korkus2000]

The best way is to use the onion skin feature. It is like the old animation light tables. It may take some time but you are really just manipulating the what you have. I fyou really want to try your hand at more complex animations, then I suggest swift 3d. It is a 3d animation program that lets you animate and save to a flash file. It isn't free though. I believe it is $170. I find 3D animation much easier than just cell animation.

[martinibuster]

Of course, you are using symbols, right?

What you can do is use a stickman symbol and create a mini movie of him/her/it walking. Just the walking movements, which should be just two steps.

Then for the walking sequence you drop the mini-movie into the timeline and let it loop. Then when it gets to a point where he/she/it stops to pick something up, you remove the mini-movie from that point on the timeline, and the very next fram is he/she/it standing there about to pick something up.

Forward movement can be conveyed by a background that is moving in the opposite direction. (Just use the looping mini-movie to convey the walking movements)

Feet landing on the ground are one of the most difficult things to animate. If you can obscure the feet, better.

Be sure to vary the shots, i.e. do a closeup or swing around behind him, etc. Variety of angles, etc makes for an interesting visual. An easy one to do is just make the character fill up more of the screen (make he/she/it larger) so that it appears as if the camera is getting closer, and all you have to do is drag the figure from left to right, then pull back to show him walking again.

Don't forget to give the character a little up and down action as it walks (the concept of Action and the corresponding Reaction).

[kingkelly]

But I think he wants to know how to animate the regular walking sequence too. I dont know if Swift is good for human animating, but more for text effects and stuff like that.

toon Boom Studio is high end, and is really good for animating online cartoons in flash. Even has cameras and lip sync options.

Youre going to have make the walking sequence a symbol, then just make the action parts (picking something up) frame by frame. thats what i would do.