Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
One big feature--introduced a couple versions back--in Flash, was the bone tool,
allowing you to complex animations, and it's only gotten better and better with each version.
I'll go ahead and show you the bone tool and how it works,
because what I have going on here is--I have this chain.
And as I go inside of this movie clip--notice that we have these various movie clips--
and really, what I want to do is, I want this chain to fall down and kind of swing.
So in order to that with a traditional tween, it would mean moving each one of these movie clips separately
and lining them up and tilting them and doing all of that, and it would take a lot of time.
But if I just undo that movement, I want to show you how I can go ahead and use the bone tool to link together these movie clips.
So I'll just click and drag from one movie clip to the next, to link them together.
So there I have it--all of those are now linked together.
It creates this armature layer, right here.
It's actually green, and it has that one pose right there.
And, in fact, if I select these different bones, you can see--over in the properties panel--
it actually gives me some additional properties for each one of these.
But what I can do is--I can go in to about, say frame 10, or maybe about frame 15,
and I can select this last movie clip and pull it down.
And when I reposition that movie clip, it actually creates this new pose, right here.
So now, it will fall straight down.
So I can go ahead and hit the Enter key.
And with Flash CS5.5, what I can do is--I can go ahead and select this loop button right here,
and just see a snapshot of this motion, right in here.
I'll click the Play button, and it will loop over and over again.
But you can, obviously, tell that this really isn't that realistic of motion.
And what I want it to do is I want it to fall more naturally.
So let's just go ahead and turn that off--stop that.
What I want to do now is--I want to go ahead and introduce--by just double-clicking on this one bone,
I can go ahead and select all of these bones.
And I want to point out, right down here, instead of constraining some of the rotation or translation,
I want to add some springiness.
So what I want to add first is some strength.
So I'm going to give it some weight by typing in 100 right there.
Then I'm going to give it some dampening.
This means it's going to slow down--over time--a certain amount.
And I'll just drag that out to about 57.
So this I've done for every single one of these bones.
So now, when I go ahead and hit this Play button,
it falls much more naturally and looks really good,
and was really easy for me to create; it works out great!
Not only can I control the springiness, the strength, and the dampening for this entire armature,
but also for each bone.
So I can select this armature, right down here, and I can makes its dampening less,
and I can adjust it on a per-bone basis.
So you really do have a lot of control when it comes manipulating bones and linking objects together
like I'm doing so, here.
Also in CS5.5, I actually have the ability to pin down bones, as well.
So if I want to keep this joint from moving, I can select it and select Pin,
and now when I pull it down, you can see that it locks it down, right there.
And that really helps out a lot if you're doing any sort of animation.
Even if I was animating this character, I might want to pin certain parts of his body.
But in this case, I don't really need to worry about that.
I'll stretch it back out and turn off that pin,
because what I have now is a pretty nice motion of that chain falling.
It looks great, all through, just having 2 poses
and the right sort of springiness associated with that--those bones.
The last thing I want to point out is what you can do, and what I have going on over here,
is I have this bone structure, and it's linking these different objects together,
but if I take a look at my properties panel, there's different Y translations that are locked down,
so it only moves vertically.
But not only that, if I select that pose, right up here, and I look at the options,
it's set to Run Time; that's its option.
So this turns over the control of this object to the user.
So not during author time, when I'm working in Flash, but during a run time--
now the user has control to manipulate these objects.
So I'll just go ahead and test this movie.
See our beautiful chain falling--looks great.
And again, giving the user the control to manipulate this object,
you can see how this would work out great for technical illustrations.
So this is just some good examples of being able to link movie clips together using this bone structure.
It not only gives you more realistic movement, but it's also a much faster way to animate.
So go ahead, give it a try yourself.
And thanks so much for watching.
