Blowing Flag

mike_burges · Post by **mike_burges** » Sat Jan 03, 2009 12:25 pm

Hi guys, afraid I have another little animation feight to over come.

I have an image of a flag, rectangle, and i need to make it look like its blowing in the wind. I expected to be able to use bones to warp it but am having no luck.-

-The point at which the flag is joined to the flag pole will not lock and moves away from the pole.

- I cannot get anywhere near the range of movement I need for a gentle billowing then sudden burst in the opposite direction...

Perhaps anime studio is not the right tool for the job?

Greatly appreciate any ideas anyone has or how the effect has been overcome in the past (other than frame by frame drawing).

Mike

mike_burges · Post by **mike_burges** » Sat Jan 03, 2009 12:27 pm

p.s how does the "lock bone" check box work? i know it can come in hand for walk cycles being able to fix the feet to the ground but it never seems to lock!?

mkelley · Post by **mkelley** » Sat Jan 03, 2009 3:35 pm

I assume you've already looked at the "flag" prop in the AS library, right? That should give you some ideas on what you can do.

I didn't examine it, but if I were doing a flag I'd definitely be assigning vertices to a parent bone to lock them from being influenced by any other.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Sat Jan 03, 2009 4:25 pm

Your flag difficulties have to do with not understanding AS yet, not with any lacking in the application. If you are looking for "automatic cloth physics" then no, AS isn't going to offer that. However if you add more points, and more bones to control the flag you can get smoother motion. Do the tutorials though, look at the sample files, they will help.

You don't need to use the lock bone feature for the flag. As far as using lock bones... they do "lock" the bones in relation to the bone hierarchy. The last bone in the chain is locked. If you drag other bones in the chain then that last locked bone will stay in position, however if you drag a bone further than the chain can reach the locked bone WILL move or translate.

-vern

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Sat Jan 03, 2009 7:05 pm

Something like this? I whipped this up in like ten minutes. The flag is an image warped by bones, and the pole is vector.

http://www.mediafire.com/?meoel9ilut9
Please only use this as reference.

funksmaname · Post by **funksmaname** » Sat Jan 03, 2009 9:18 pm

Here's my crude test - http://www.vimeo.com/2709142

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Tue Jan 06, 2009 5:21 am

Well I wasn't terribly happy with that other flag, so I felt I had to post this.

Finally figured out a good 'rolling' cloth bone rig.

Genete · Post by **Genete** » Tue Jan 06, 2009 7:54 am

synthsin75: I feel that the waves comes from the end of the flag to the stick. Shouldn't go the waves go from the stick to the end of the flag? (from small to big wave amplitude?)

-G

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Tue Jan 06, 2009 1:08 pm

True enough, I was just happy with the improvement over the last one. I see about fixing that when I get a chance.

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Tue Jan 06, 2009 2:13 pm

synth: could you do me a favour and change your avatar pic? Like, something which is not 2 MB big? Something which will not prevent the pages from loading when connection is shaky? Something about 20 kB?
Thank you.

mkelley · Post by **mkelley** » Tue Jan 06, 2009 2:16 pm

ST,

Doesn't your browser cache the data?

It should (I can't see why not). I'm not saying Wes shouldn't redo his avatar or not, but I'm just surprised your laptop would have an issue after the first time you visited this forum (unless you cleared your cache or something).

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Tue Jan 06, 2009 2:50 pm

It has to load that pic everytime I visit the forum again, which can be several times a day. Anyway, when I started websurfing, it was considered polite not to have a signature longer than 4 lines, and a webpage shouldn't have more than 50 kB, pics and all.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Tue Jan 06, 2009 8:30 pm

Holy cow! It is 2mb!

I had to download it to be sure. Yes... uh... er... that is kind of big for an avatar.

-vern

Post by **Víctor Paredes** » Tue Jan 06, 2009 9:56 pm

ok, I don't know if it is well, but I have played around with the file and it's pretty difficult to make it lighter.

1,13 mb

650 kb

You can use one of this if you want. Sorry about the velocity (I didn't notice I make the gif faster

) I will fix it if you want to use it, synth.

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Wed Jan 07, 2009 12:17 am

I'm very sorry, Slow. I had no idea. Thanks for letting me know about it.

I have noticed since changing browsers that Firefox loads a page differently. IE seems to cache everything but the images before showing the page while Firefox seems to try to show everything as it is cached.

In Firefox, when my connection is on the fritz, even something like DK's avatar will slow things down, but I always assumed that linked images weren't so bad.

Ah well.