Animations Simplification Techniques

Question

Hi All,

I am curious to understand what simplification techniques you use to speed up your animation process. Although I have mess around with Flash and animate for almost 2 decades, I am still very much a novice animator and I imagine most animators learn to simplify or what can be simplified, via experience.

I'll start off. Mine is not so much a tip, but more of a dilemma and one of the reasons I put this question to the forum.

I am currently working on animating some assets for a game. I have rigged one of the characters, pretty standard, head > neck > chest > upper arm > lower > hand etc. That said I realized after messing around with keyframing and parenting, that if I had of roughed out the animation first, then just created primitives and manipulated to the shapes required I probably could have saved a whole lot of time.

Anyway please share your tips. Perhaps others may benefit from them.

n. tilcheff · Accepted Answer

Hi again, mate!

I've written quite a lot over the years about good practices, which I have identified as useful while working at various studios or we at EDAP Tools have designed specifically for Flash/Animate character animation.

Here are a bunch of links, if this is of interest:

http://flash-powertools.com/workflow/

http://flash-powertools.com/character-rigging-for-flash-animation/

http://flash-powertools.com/understanding-symbol-registration/

http://flash-powertools.com/keeping-cycles-flexible-for-easy-re-timing-by-using-service-frame-and-working-two-levels-deep/

http://flash-powertools.com/smart-magnet-rigs/

And I've also made some sample files, that are supposed to show how I rig and structure animation:

http://flash-powertools.com/tag/free-download/

Best regards!