the common modern use of flash (tweening body parts like an ik rig or something) is garbage and the singular brush style imposes a specific aesthetic that i dont want to deal with anymore

Quote from: AnkhClock on September 21, 2015, 12:39:04 AM
lol have you seen my animations getting professional software isn't gonna help them

thats not true, ankh! you do great flash movies!

Quote from: OJ on September 21, 2015, 12:55:16 AM
Weight in on the flash debate? I shouldn't but.
Imagine flash as a tool in itself, theres better tools out there but it can still get the job done.
You could do all your art in mspaint if your skilled enough.

very true! flash may not be up to date, or extremely relevant, buts its a good tool, and it can still get the job done.
i like flash, and especially flash 8. its a great program.

Quote from: SockpuppetClock on September 22, 2015, 03:52:10 PM
the common modern use of flash (tweening body parts like an ik rig or something) is garbage and the singular brush style imposes a specific aesthetic that i dont want to deal with anymore

This is the first argument against Flash that I have taken seriously in my life



Luckily, I don't agree with it, so I can keep using Flash

You can use flash as much as you like, I'm not your mum, but do so knowing that it is not the best tool for the job, and the only reason you're using it, is because you'll think it'll take too long to learn something else.

I can respect that, it's difficult to put risk in spending a lot of time not animating, to learn how to use a new animation program, and you don't know if it'll be worth the time and effort until you have a mastery over the new software. That is absolutely fair enough, but Flash is definitely an inferior product, it gets some of the same features much, much later, if at all, and implemented worse every time. Adobe is abandoning Flash, they're not enough money in it to sustain it any more. You may get a couple more years of new CC versions where nothing's changed again, but that's about it.

Thinking about it, the CC regular payment system is set up nicely so they don't have to come out with big new versions of Flash, they don't actually have to work on anything new, and they'll still get income from people subscribed.

Unless you're animating with the line tool in powerpoint you're not a real artist.

Toonbooms GUI is so fucking I'm a edgy teen I get turned off every time. And every time I open up flash I get turned off so it all equals out.

Quote from: Sinister Clock on September 23, 2015, 05:54:15 AM
the only reason you're using it, is because you'll think it'll take too long to learn something else.

Stopped reading after this

Quote from: PhantomCatClock on September 23, 2015, 10:04:06 PM

Quote from: Sinister Clock on September 23, 2015, 05:54:15 AM
the only reason you're using it, is because you'll think it'll take too long to learn something else.

Stopped reading after this

Lol if you read any of his posts beyond "Sinister Clock"

you can love flash, but you can't deny it has a rap sheet for domestic violence

• fill segments randomly disappear when you're trying to select portions of them
• the color adjustment tools are woefully inadequate (paws up: who's used the eyedrop tool to change fill colors to a color that you used a different tool entirely to obtain? my go-to is the gradient window)
• using tweens can create useless repeat symbols in your library without telling you because you forgot to delete a tiny invisible object on the same layer
• undoing this action does not remove the symbol
• double clicking to adjust a movieclip on a tween will split the tween at the frame, which makes making adjustments to it clunky and difficult and generally meaning having to delete and redo either the tween or the changes made
• brush selection is lumpy, extremely limited, and difficult to meaningfully customize, and smoothing is clunky and imprecise, to the point when I've resorted to zooming in and manually deleting aberrations in brush art with the selection and line tools
• native audio compression can export as either terrible or with a massive filesize
• alpha channels never properly display for nested symbols or symbols with overlapping layers
• you have to twist its fucking arm to keep sounds playing in sync
• movieclips don't sync frames graphically on the main timeline
• raster images lose their alpha channel when pasted instead of imported and can't be natively edited other than transforming (and no bicubic or bilinear scaling btw)
• vertices of more than like 3 intersecting lines randomly unalign in the center
• masking ignores alpha channel on fills
• filters devour memory when zoomed
• whole program crashes randomly, and it if it crashes during a save the entire file can be lost, so you have to back up constantly.

not to mention adobe moving to this whack assed "pay to use the software you've already bought" policy. not that that affects us, because most of us are working with an 11 year old version of the software, since that's the last time anything of use to you was added by the developers.

do any other programs fix these things? do they introduce problems of their own? I don't know. I know I've been using flash so long that at this point I instinctively work around it being terrible, and it still finds surprising new ways of fucking me up

Quote from: Slurpee on August 11, 2014, 12:50:24 PM
edit: okay, back on track. flash kept replacing by background incidental with a sound that no longer exists. problem was rectified by transferring everything to a new document. when in doubt~

~half an hour later...~

Quote from: Slurpee on August 11, 2014, 01:28:02 PM
ughhhhhhh does anybody know why flash would suddenly start grouping every new object like it thinks it's adobe illustrator

Quote from: Slurpee on May 23, 2014, 02:20:21 AM
so I switched a movieclip to graphic so I could see how the animation in it aligned with the main timeline, and flash decided it would automatically swap every graphic instance I clicked from then on with a drawing of a coffee pot that I named stone cold steve austin
I quit and opened and it's still doing it, and if I undo the action that summoned stone cold, stone cold goes away
changing or renaming stone cold or changing its default state does nothing to correct this
and I can't delete stone cold without having to manually swap it out with an identical graphic

the solution? why, moving to a different layer on the timeline, of course!

HAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
fuck you flash

you all have stories like this

we also now have to work around .swf no longer being the web's playback standard. Newgrounds made it easy with Swivel, but .swf being the playback standard only happened because of restrictive storage and bandwidth costs, and .swf being the playback standard is the only reason I learned Flash in the first place

idk. it really might be time to move on. passed time, even.
all the professional and student animators that i follow work with toon boom, anime studio, celaction2d, toonz, flipbook, or tvpaint, and generally seem to consider them to be much more friendly for animation (with the possible exception of toon boom, which i seem to recall some students absolutely loathing)

i'm up for at least trying out something new.
maybe we can make a thread about it, and learn together. =)

closing thought: there is an active community for Microsoft 3D Movie Maker, the very best children's 3d animation software that 1995 had to offer.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=3dmm&lclk=month&filters=month
[u2]ijN7WqJKEiQ[/u2]
[u2]VIJpIYMuQOc[/u2]

Quote from: Slurpee on September 24, 2015, 05:22:58 AM

• you have to twist its fucking arm to keep sounds playing in sync

This.
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS




this

Quote from: Slurpee on September 24, 2015, 05:22:58 AM

• fill segments randomly disappear when you're trying to select portions of them
• the color adjustment tools are woefully inadequate (paws up: who's used the eyedrop tool to change fill colors to a color that you used a different tool entirely to obtain? my go-to is the gradient window)
• using tweens can create useless repeat symbols in your library without telling you because you forgot to delete a tiny invisible object on the same layer
• undoing this action does not remove the symbol
• double clicking to adjust a movieclip on a tween will split the tween at the frame, which makes making adjustments to it clunky and difficult and generally meaning having to delete and redo either the tween or the changes made
• brush selection is lumpy, extremely limited, and difficult to meaningfully customize, and smoothing is clunky and imprecise, to the point when I've resorted to zooming in and manually deleting aberrations in brush art with the selection and line tools
• native audio compression can export as either terrible or with a massive filesize
• alpha channels never properly display for nested symbols or symbols with overlapping layers
• you have to twist its fucking arm to keep sounds playing in sync
• movieclips don't sync frames graphically on the main timeline
• raster images lose their alpha channel when pasted instead of imported and can't be natively edited other than transforming (and no bicubic or bilinear scaling btw)
• vertices of more than like 3 intersecting lines randomly unalign in the center
• masking ignores alpha channel on fills
• filters devour memory when zoomed
• whole program crashes randomly, and it if it crashes during a save the entire file can be lost, so you have to back up constantly.

not to mention adobe moving to this whack assed "pay to use the software you've already bought" policy. not that that affects us, because most of us are working with an 11 year old version of the software, since that's the last time anything of use to you was added by the developers.

Damn, reading that list gave me the shivers.

Quote
i'm up for at least trying out something new.
maybe we can make a thread about it, and learn together. =)

I don't want to learn new things. But Flash has been crashing on startup (except sometimes if I open different files for some reason ONE of them will work and then the original can be opened after that). I'm looking into alternate drawing/animating tools.

I still love Flash, even though it acts like a big dumb baby. I love its stupid drawing tools and I haven't found anything close in terms of game development environments.

Switching from vectors to pixels makes me nervous.

But yeah, this is a dysfunctional relationship.

When people gradually left flash it was a sad sight. Flash had the coolest potential and then it just stopped in its tracks... It somehow went from flash to iphone apps and games and that really sucks for the amateur animator. I was looking forward to an animated internet as flash websites were all the rage and then suddenly became the symbolic representation of 'shitty and unwanted'.

Quote from: Slurpee on September 24, 2015, 05:22:58 AM
closing thought: there is an active community for Microsoft 3D Movie Maker, the very best children's 3d animation software that 1995 had to offer.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=3dmm&lclk=month&filters=month

oh my LORD does this ever fucking blow my mind... My childhood self is peeing his pants. I can't believe people are actually modding and producing animations with that shit.

Quote from: Sinister Clock on September 21, 2015, 11:32:06 AM

You could do a lot of things to make your job harder, I don't know why that would be preferable to using tools and software designed to make your job more efficient and better.

Those tools don't necessarily make your job easier its all a matter of preference.
At first sight you could claim toon boom is superior tool, id even say it blows flash out of the water.

However toon boom has its flaws. are you sure that Its better then flash in every-way? the onion skin sucks, almost pathetic.  Its UI is convoluted, and doesn't have anything like action script which allows you tons of versatility, you cant create particle effects in engine.

With that logic, drop animation software all together.
Produce all your stuff in Photoshop, chop it up in premier, post produce it after effects.

My point is rather than despair over the proper software, make your shit.
thats all that matters.

Actually Toon Boom has a versatile node-based engine, and plenty of ways to create particles. It's much more versatile and designed with animation in mind.

Sure it has it's flaws, but they're undeniably less than Flash, a bad, outdated program, that was not designed for animation. Not only is Toon Boom already better in the UI and scripting department, but it will continue to get better, whereas Flash with stay still forever. Does anyone here really think they improved anything from Flash 5 to Flash CC 2015 mega ultra x edition?

I thought the UI for Zbrush was terrible when I first used it, it was so unintuitive and hard to wrap my head around, but once I got used to it I realized it was designed specifically for sculpting, allowing you to move around naturally and manipulate the model efficiently.

You can still use Flash to your heart's content, I know plenty of animators who grew used to it and refuse to learn any new software, because it'll take too long. That's fine, but it's not because Flash is the ultimate animation software ever made.

It depends what you want to do with animation too, certainly. If you ever want to be professional, you have to be willing to learn shit loads of new software, and the more you learn the more you can do. I'm mainly 3D nowadays, but I have to learn sculpting software, texturing software, UV unwrapping software, animation software, rigging software, make my own software, make my own tools, all sorts. The thing is, the more I learn, the more things I'm aware I can do, and if you don't know you can do it, then you never will.

It always feels worse and way more daunting to learn new software than it actually is. 2D to 3D might take you a while longer however, plenty of people have lost their careers from refusal to learn 3D, though that's calmed down now. But other 2D programs, when you already understand 2D animation isn't bad, just a couple of tutorials and experiments and you're up to go with even more, more efficient tools.

So my point is that the medium you choose to animate, definitely has consequences on your animation. Fundamental animation skills are more important, obviously, but that's because you can transfer those skills between mediums and software if you choose, it may be the difference between spending months on trying to dance with Flash stepping on your toes, or spending weeks waltzing with another software.


EDIT: I just want to make clear that I'm not saying "toon boom is the new flash, everyone jump switch to toon boom", I'm saying there are a lot of better tools out there. Personally I prefer TV Paint, since it's raster-based instead of vector based. Even then, I rarely use it, since I'm mainly doing 3D stuff now, and a bit of Manga Studio for illustration and painting.

Odd. Flash is being taught at my program after a year of refusal. The motives to learn it though is a poor excuse from the students.

Quote from: Sinister Clock on September 28, 2015, 06:57:33 AM


EDIT: I just want to make clear that I'm not saying "toon boom is the new flash, everyone jump switch to toon boom", I'm saying there are a lot of better tools out there. Personally I prefer TV Paint, since it's raster-based instead of vector based. Even then, I rarely use it, since I'm mainly doing 3D stuff now, and a bit of Manga Studio for illustration and painting.

Fair enough, Im not trying to turn anything a shit slinging match ethire :P
Ill agree tv paint is great, and looks like toon boom is slighty better than I thought