Foundation Flash CS4 for Designers- P15: I can remember the day as clear as if it were just yesterday. I was walking by my boss’s office late one winter afternoon at the college where I teach, and he called me into his office. Sitting on his desk was a thin, white box with some sort of weird swirl on it. He slid the box across to me and asked, “You know anything about Flash?” | ANIMATION PART 2 4. Use the Selection tool to select the whole shape then switch to the Bone tool and try to add an IK bone. Instead of a new armature you ll see an alert box telling you the shape is too complex. Want to know the culprit 5. Switch to the Subselection tool and draw a selection around the whole shape. Each of those 50 stars is composed of 10 anchor points. That s 500 points already and that doesn t include the stripes. We re not sure where the official line is drawn but 500 anchor points is too much. Your turn Animate a fully rigged IK model We figure you appreciate worms and skeleton hands as much as the next designer and so do we . But surely your thoughts have already wandered toward more complex implementations. We suspect you re wondering if the IK tools are useful for more than a few fingers. What about a whole body The answer to these questions is yes and you re about to find out firsthand. In this final exercise of the chapter you ll expand on what you learned in previous sections by rigging up a character with arms and legs and then animating it against a backdrop of hand-sketched poses. Let s do it. 1. Open the file from the Exercise folder for this chapter. You ll see an assembled collection of symbols in the likeness of Richard see Figure 8-58 one of the regular characters in Steve Napierski s web comic The Outer Circle http . The authors would like to give Steve a hearty thanks for letting us use his artwork See more at http . Figure 8-58. Meet Richard. Give him a hug. You re going to make Richard jump. 409 CHAPTER 8 We chose Richard for this exercise for a particular reason he s super skinny which means it s not especially easy to rig up his armature. Going this route will give you practice which is good because real-life projects have a tendency to introduce unexpected challenges. Given this set of very narrow graphic symbols we find that it helps if you take the reins from Flash in .
