When i first saw the bone tool in flash, i was very excited to use it. Now that i have used it, I find it is pathetic…
I dont know who has tested this tool and can’t understand how Adobe QA has approved it…
Some of the many problems with it are:
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In the Armature layer (created automatically when u use bone tool to connect symbols), there is no option to remove multiple frames, cut or copy multiple frames. Even if you want to cut, copy or remove a single frame, an intuitive approach of “clicking that frame, right-clicking & selecting either cut, copy or remove frame” is not supported. Instead if the armature layer is already selected, then you first need to select some other frame, then straight-away right-click on the frame that you want to cut, copy or remove. And then select the option from the context menu. You don’t have any shortcut for these three commands neither do they appear in the Modify>>Timeline submenu. So you have to use this ‘frustrating’, “right clicking a single frame” approach to do any of these operations. In my project, if i do any mistake, then i have to literally remove 100s of frames one-by-one from the armature layer!
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For longer animations, you will start seeing the connected Symbol instances (connected with the help of bones), literally ‘explode’ to different corners of the screen when you try to insert ‘Poses’ by copying previous ‘Poses’. Sometimes this happens even if you simply insert a frame in the armature layer.
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For longer animation, the object positions ‘shift’ in previous frames if you insert poses. Thus, if u have just inserted a new pose at say frame number 441, then you have to go through frames 1-440 to see whether any of the previous pose has been changed ‘automatically’ and you will find that if there is any change, it will be drastic and no ‘Undo’ will revert it back. The only option you have (if you have not saved the file) is reverting the file to previously saved version!
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Again for longer animation, the position of object’s center-of-rotation gets changed (and this is what causes the above problem number 3). If you try to reset the position of object’s rotation-point, all the keyframes in the armature layer will change the position of that object ‘drastically’.
I am currently working with the bone tool and have no option now as I have started the work and a lot of it has been completed. But the experience has been downright ‘FRUSTRATING’. I have to finish this work as only about 10% is left but its terribly ‘head-banging’ stuff. So I wanted to warn everybody who use Flash that ‘BONE’ tool of CS4 is simply ugly… Please dont use it…