Animating the Octopus

[PleasantlyOdd]

Hello,

I apologize for the shoddy video. As shown, I've created some simple shapes with illustrator using lines and strokes... I have two questions.

1. Is it possible to do what I describe in the video? using an animating programme to fill in the black space between two keyframe movements?

2. Is there a way to export an illustrator shape like this to Animate CC, or do I have to try and replicate the idea in Animate CC.

[Colin Holgate · Accepted solution]

You can import or copy and paste shapes from Illustrator to Animate, but you might want to play around with the tools in Animate, and draw directly in Animate

When you have shapes on the stage like that you should be able to do a Shape Tween. When you do you may get results where points go diagonally straight towards the ending point. There's a thing called Shape Hints in the Modify/Shapes menu, with that you can put down dots in the first keyframe, and in the next keyframe you can drag the dot to give a hint about where you want that part of the shape to tween to.

Do a search in YouTube for flash shape hints, to get some demo video about how it works.

There are some number of features that only work in AS3 files, and not in HTML5 files. If you're just animating you should use an AS3 FLA. If you need to you could convert that to HTML5 after making the animation.

[Colin Holgate]

I notice one possible complication in your drawings. When the shapes tween over themselves it will form a new shape, nothing like your originals.

You could think about making the articulated parts be a different layer.