09.+Kinematics+Motion

When you want to animate an articulated object (one that has multiple joints), such as a walking person, or as in this example, a moving crane, Flash CS4 makes it easy to do so with inverse kinematics. Inverse kinematics is a mathematical way to calculate the different angles of a jointed object to achieve a certain configuration. You can pose your object in a beginning keyframe, and then set a different pose at a later keyframe. Flash will use inverse kinematics to figure out the different angles for all the joints to get from the first pose to the next pose. Inverse kinematics makes animating easy because you don’t have to worry about animating each segment of an object or limb of a character. You just focus on the overall poses.
 * Motion with Inverse Kinematics **

The first step to create articulated motion is to define the bones of your object. You use the Bone tool to do that. The Bone tool tells Flash how a series of movie clip instances are connected. The connected movie clips are called the armature, and each movie clip is called a node.

**PART I:** Together we are going to animate a crane that has multiple joints. Our objective is to swing the hook into the ocean and pull it back out. At the same time we are going to use shape tweens to animate the ocean. This lesson will introduce the use of the bone tool and we will learn how to animate an articulated object. This will lead us in the direction of walking characters that can be used within our animation movies.

media type="file" key="crane.swf" width="360" height="270" align="center"



**Requirements** :
 * Animate the crane to bend over and dip into the ocean.
 * Turn the ocean into shape tweens and make the waves move.

**PART II:** The crane is an armature made with various movie clip symbols. You can also create armatures with **shapes**, which are useful for animating objects without obvious joints and segments but can still have an articulated motion. For example, the arms of an octopus have no actual joints, but you can add bones to a smooth tentacle to animate its undulating motion. media type="file" key="octidos.swf" width="360" height="270" align="center"

**PART III:** You are going to import your octi.swf file into the crane library. Then you are going to have the hook pull wiggling octi out of the ocean. You must use a motion tween and don't forget about onion skins to help get octi on the hook.
 * Requirements: **
 * Move Octi's 7 other tentacles using the bone tool.
 * You must copy each tentacle and paste it in place onto a new layer in order to use the bone tool with shapes.

Requirements:
 * Have the hook of the crane pull the wiggling octopus out of the moving ocean.

media type="file" key="CraneBlakely.swf" width="360" height="270" align="center" **PART IV:** Your objective is to create a walking character that will walk across the stage. Think about what type of character of you would like to create and remember to be original. You have two options to approach designing your character. you are going to have to separate your body parts as pieces so that you can animate them. You can make each body part and turn each part into a separate symbol or you can draw each part as a shape but on a new layer. After creating your character that walks in place you will create a new stage for him/her to walk across. **Requirements:**
 * Create an original character in Flash.
 * Make sure you have the character's body parts broken into separate symbols or layers.
 * Import your walking character into a new Flash stage and use a motion tween to have your character walk across the stage. Be creative and make up a background that correlates with your walking character.
 * All work must be original.