Bone Tool?

[Doomdoom20]

I have an older version of flash and was thinking about upgrading it. Mostly because of the new bone-tool which seems to make animating smoother. Want to know does it make everything easier, easy to use, and basically worth it?

Thanks

[ifureadthisdie]

Not at all. Flash's bone tool is not at all like the more professional ones out there, it's very gimmicky and it does not make your animations smoother. 2D animation with rigs generally don't look so well unless the character is made to act with stiff movements and like his rigs are to be emphasized on. If you wanna do pseudo bone tool animation without the hassle then use movie clips and move the pivot points to connect with each end of the separated "bones"

[gradenator]

Bone tool is pretty glitchy too. I would save a working animation, reload it later, then see it completely screwed up and only fixable by having to start over. Armature layers (where all boned stuff ends up) are lame and can't be copied.

Get a 30 day trial of cs5 and see if it's for you. Flash 8 is still awesome enough to keep around.

[HowardWimshurst]

hi. I use flash 8 and upgraded to flash CS5. I do not for one moment regret upgrading however I tried a few sample animations using the bone tool and was very disapointed at the results

pay close attention to the legs in this animation. I used the bone tool with the legs and it turned out a struggle to move them into the right positions
http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/b6b8 44df69f8d56415a91efa56b9bb4d

I found I could get the same results and better by having a cutout and not using bone tool and just by distributing the different symbols(arms/legs/etc) to different layers then motion tweening them all at once because this way I could scale/ scew and rotate the different pices how i wanted. the result was much better as you can see here

• 
  the Simulation by terabiter

  Click to view.

  Type

  Movie

  Rated

  Ages 13+

my advise is upgrade if possible for the other benefits but dont use the bone tool in character animation. only things such as springs, tentacles and snakes.