How reliable is bone tool in Animate CC 2018?

Report · Oct 05, 2018

Every fall, I teach a game development course that includes an animation module. During this module, students use Adobe Animate CC to create short (45 to 60 second) animations. Last year, several students used the bone tool and realized that it was somewhat buggy and unreliable. At the time, the consensus of online opinion seemed to agree that the bone tool was not quite ready for prime time.

A year later, I'm wondering if things have improved. Assuming that the student is reasonably self-driven and confident about their ability to learn new things, what should I do?

A) Encourage students to lean into the bone tool.

B) Steer them away from the bone tool.

C) Encourage students to experiment with the bone tool, but warn them that it is still a bit cranky and unpredictable.

Thanks!

Report · Oct 10, 2018

I would encourage students to explore the bone tool and if they find a bug, record the bug through screen recording or screenshots and send it to Adobe so they can fix the bug and keep making Animate awesome. Just like you did here. What were some of the bugs?

Report · Oct 10, 2018

Hi -- I was referring to threads like this one:

Bone tool not working properly. Animate cc 2017

And comments from that thread like:

The Bone tool seems to have its share of issues and it's difficult to pinpoint them as they are random. But overall, I have found that armatures made with the Bone tool are very unstable and unpredictable. I did a live stream a few weeks ago where I created a simple stick man character and tried to rig it using Bones and pretty early on in my efforts, the bone tool made the animation process unusable. I quickly abandoned the bone tool and completed the animation using key poses, frame-by-frame and some tweening.

And:

Animate CC's bone tool is not production ready in its current state (it never was) - simple as that. For those who need/want to animate with IK rigged vector-based 2d cut-out characters, I suggest checking out either Moho Pro or Harmony Premium (expensive). Moho Pro does a pretty bang-on job in this regard - even better than Harmony. It compliments Animate CC rather well, since Moho is pretty bad a frame-by-frame, which Animate CC is good at. Good combo.

Thanks!