7 Replies Latest reply: Jan 9, 2011 9:20 PM by Jeriah RSS

    IK Bone Tool and Movie clips/tranform bug?

    ccy2693
      In Flash, when you rotate a movieclip in the IDE, then release, the movieclip will often (80% of the time) lose .1-.2% of its scale. You can see the numbers changing in the transform window. It will continue to decrease the more you rotate/release, gradually shrinking.

      For an IK armature (using the bone tool), which is pretty much all about rotations, this is a major issue. A simple animation of a human character waving can bring their forearm scale down from 100% to 92% by the end.

      Aside from being visually noticeable (my arm is shrinking!) the Armature itself seems to react badly, losing joint connections, randomly displacing movieclips, and generally being unpredictable. I can't tell to what extent the Armature bugginess is directly caused by the gradual scale-creep -- but it's certainly not helping.

      The Armature in the Bone Tool is uneditable- editing the position of a bone relative to another bone causes the other movieclips in the skeleton to start inching in random directions.

      Any suggestions? Any help for either the movieclip scaling or Bone Tool problems would be appreciated.

      Thanks!

        • 1. IK Bone Tool and Movie clips/tranform bug?
          bradsmith6680
          I've had the same problem with the Bone tool and I am greatly dissapointed in it. When in an armature and all the symbols inch around out of place it makes the animation look terrible. I sent in a bug report to adobe but they said they couldn't recreate the problem. I really wish this would be fixed because the bone tool was one of the main reasons I was excited for CS4.
          • 2. Re: IK Bone Tool and Movie clips/tranform bug?
            Jeriah

            I'm experiencing the same issue as you, Bradsmith.  I'm animating with an armature and all of a sudden, I'll notice on of the symbols of the skeleton has moved quite noticably out of place.  I'll correct it, but when I go review other poses, they all have the same issue.  When I manually tweak every pose, something else gets moved while I'm not looking.  Sometimes I can see an unselected symbol move as I move the selected symbol.  It drives me nuts.  So many hours wasted correcting placement errors and it has happened way to often to claim that it's user error in selecting more than one symbol at a time.

            • 3. Re: IK Bone Tool and Movie clips/tranform bug?
              dublyner Community Member

              I have also been struggling with this exact problem, bones inching out of place or their IK Joints roaming, even when working on separate armatures!

               

              I'm currently running CS4, is there any hope that CS5 has addressed this issue?

              • 4. Re: IK Bone Tool and Movie clips/tranform bug?
                Jen deHaan Community Member

                I don't know about the non-replication, but this is a known issue and has been reproduced internally. It's caused by a very fundamental and long standing thing in Flash called the "matrix", which does calculations on the object. Each rotation/scale/etc operation causes a calculation, and this calculation causes the number to change - things like rounding and estimations. It's not a direct number applied to the object (which would be ideal).

                 

                This will occur with regular objects, tweened objects, and IK - it may be more or less apparent based on what you're doing, but it has always been in Flash (I can reproduce in Flash 8 for example). One of the things that exposes is especially is hot text, because a ton of calculations are potentially made as you drag and let go so it is less apparent in earlier versions. The less you drag (rotate, etc) things, the fewer calculations/rounding.

                 

                Anyway, like I say this is known and there is a bug filed. It is a massive change for Flash due to the core and long-standing functionality (the bug is an ECR to directly set properties instead of using the matrix), but I also hope it's considered for a future version.

                • 5. Re: IK Bone Tool and Movie clips/tranform bug?
                  Googolhz Community Member

                  This was a problem in CS4, and continues to be a problem in CS5. However, I suggest to Adobe a simple solution to this issue: Why not cache the original Matrix data and make all Matrix transformation from the original cache, rather than from the last progressive Matrix transform. This way Flash will not progressively compound transform errors.

                  • 6. Re: IK Bone Tool and Movie clips/tranform bug?
                    Googolhz Community Member

                    So, after more searching around, I found this thread ( http://forums.adobe.com/message/994148#994148  ) Which suggested unchecking the IK Bone auto transform tool, under Flash > Preferences > Drawing prefs.  At first, that had no effect, and my armature bones continued to creep cumulatively. At some point I switched my armature to authortime (which didn't work) then back to runtime, and things  are better! No more crawling, shrinking bone joints. Yeah! Now, I still have a problem with the IK Spring bug, which I describe here: http://forums.adobe.com/message/3257613?tstart=0#3257613

                    • 7. Re: IK Bone Tool and Movie clips/tranform bug?
                      Jeriah Community Member

                      Unfortunately, I couldn't make Googolhertz's solution work with what I already put together.  It wouldn't allow me to swap between authortime and runtime due to the presence of a graphic symbol, so I can't tell if swapping between the two modes has anything to do with the fix.  However, after applying the aforementioned changes in the preferences menu of Flash, I rebuilt the armature from scratch. The bug seems to be taken care of.

                       

                      I would venture to guess that using any graphic symbols or movie clips from a file prior to changing your preferences in an armature will still have the bug.  It is only after they are converted/updated into a graphic symbol or movie clip after the preference settings change that the bug went away for me.  IE Opening an old fla that was created before changing the settings and making an armature from those symbols would still have the bug, despite the preference settings change.  However, opening the same file, but converting the pieces into graphic symbols or movie clips after changing the settings wouldn't have the bug.  Thus, it seems that applying the change will not retroactively apply itself to current assets in a project, but only assets that are created after the preference settings change.