Craig Phillips - Project 5

Project 5

What specific use did the shape tween serve?

I used the shape tween to change the otherwise-empty flower pot into a flower pot with a budding plant in it.

What challenges did you have using the Bone tools?

The biggest challenge is using the bone tool on a shape made with parts all in a close area (ie: my crab shape). It wasn't as bad when I started using the bind tool to get rid of some of the associations, but at first all the legs were pulling on each other and distorting the shape pretty badly.

After creating the IK with shapes and symbols, which did you prefer? Why?

I think I prefer using IK with symbols. It's a much bigger hassle (at least in the sense that it's time-consuming) to have to build all the different parts separate, but a single shape is harder to manipulate without compromising the believability of the shape itself (see the distortion I mentioned in the above question).

What benefit did you find from the nesting an IK within a movie clip?

This is just as beneficial as nesting any other animation. It's good for when you want an object to animate or behave a certain way while moving otherwise on-screen. It's essentially making the object multi-task its movements/behaviors (ie: my puppet flailing its limbs while moving across the screen).

This was a pretty straight-forward project and most of the problems that I encountered were organizational. I also kept blowing the handling of the armature if I wasn't paying enough attention. For example, I would try to select the whole puppet and move it across stage, but would accidentally grab a single bone or symbol and disassemble the parts.