A bone to pick

[AriBlack]

I had a very confusing and frustrating call with Adobe Support yesterday. 

I have a monthly subscription to the Creative Cloud suite of apps and I was trying out Animate to make some armiture-based 2D animations. I was following a tutorial which made it all look very straightforward. However, I couldn't seem to consistently select the individual bones to change their constraints. After some searches, I saw I wasn't the only one but no one had a solution so I contacted customer support.

The first time I called, there was no issue with the automated menu but the connection to the live agent was so bad that I couldn't hear them at all. I told them that I would call back and call again.

The second time, the automated system was still fine but the the connection quality to the live again was terrible but workable, so it was difficult to make out what the person was saying. They asked some, seemingly, unrelated questions about my system specifications and then wanted to connect to my computer.

I showed them what I was doing and what problem I was having. They then told me that it was "very simple" and proceeded to try themselves and, just like me, could not consistently select all the bones.

When they did manage to select one, I told them that was what I was trying to do and asked them how they did it. They repeated that it "was very simple" and so I asked them to try it with a different bone. They repeated their multiple failed attempts to select the other bone.

When I pointed out that this was exactly the problem I was having, they told me it was because I had created the armiture incorrectly. I then asked them to show me how to do it correctly. Their reply was "that's not what we support, you have to learn from a tutorial". When I asked them what they did support, they told me that they only help when the program won't launch or there's a problem. I told them there was a problem, that the bones can't be selected and they repeated that it was "very simple" and that I had done it wrong.

Many call centres have variations in the skill and knowledge of their agents, I'm used to having to call back if one can't solve the issue, but to be condescended to and then told they don't provide support for problems in their own software that I'm paying for and don't provide any direction about external resources is just unacceptable.

I don't want to call back and have the same experience again so I'm going to try to find a solution that doesn't use Adobe software.

[n. tilcheff]

Hey mate,

Since you already have the program installed why don't you give parented layers a go?

Bones are notoriously bad and in my opinion totally unusable, so trying to make them work is really a huge waste of time.

(Of cource, an official representative can never admit that the feature is useless.)

Layer Parenting is a simpler concept and the implementation is passable.

It will give you Forward Kinematics, which is more or less what you can get out of the hopeless Armature anyway...

Hope this gets you on a path which will help you complete your project!

[AriBlack]

Since I'm only trying to make sprite sheets for another application, I
thought I might try using https://rainboxlab.org/tools/duik/ with
AfterEffects. The solution was suggested in a related community post.

What do you think?

[n. tilcheff]

DUIK Bassel has a really excellent reputation.

Due to the nature of my work I have no personal experienece with it and have not used AfterEffects for years to be able to give advice, but I have been interested in Duduf's work in principle for a long time.

So if you think that AE can give you the output you need, go for it.