Flipping parented items breaks symbols
Hello all.
We just upgraded our Flash copies here at the animation studio I work at from CS6 to Animate CC 2019. Something that used to be an issue that was later fixed in CS6 ( Flipping a symbol used to negate being able to draw in it. Making a circle with the brush tool would fill your circle and delete the actual brush line. ) seems to have popped up in Animate CC with parented symbols.
We noticed it when some of our characters that have a far arm that's a flipped version of the near arm was showing issues. When skewing the lower arm ( side note, skewing parent symbols and it's effect on it's children is a whole other ballgame but one that I think we have a workaround for ) and then moving the hand, that hand starts misbehaving. It jumps further and further away from it's parent the more you try to place it back to where it should be.
When we flipped the root, nested character symbol ( this has all the pieces that make up the puppet, which most piece have their own extra drawings in, etc etc... ) then all hell breaks loose. All symbols, now being considered flipped, get wonkafied. On top of that trying to scan through the stage within that symbol with the spacebar/hand tool moves extremely erratically. Unparenting everything solves all the problems but the parent system was one of the major reasons for the upgrade. This essentially renders the parent system useless.
This is a big issue since we would have to recreate a turned around symbol for each character and every symbol within it. It adds much more time to the building/rigging process and encumbers animators who would have to bounce between more symbols ( the root ones ) for animating characters that turn around ( which happens constantly ).
In testing some more, inside a flipped, parented root symbol, I unparented all symbols and everything worked ok. I then undid until the parenting was back and things were still stable, even the spacebar/hand tool stage moving. Moved and skewed some symbols and things got wonky again.
I really hope this is being looked at by the programmers. The system would be an extremely helpful tool for animation and make it much easier to deal with very complex/dense builds.
Thanks,
Rene
