great to work with the new animation model! but i can’t still figure out how to create a SWF. 3D Tween on objects are working fine while playing on Timeline (Authoring). But in Export/Testing mode the outpanel says always:

ReferenceError: Error #1069: Eigenschaft null für fl.motion.KeyframeBase nicht gefunden und es ist kein Standardwert vorhanden.
at fl.motion::KeyframeBase/getValue()
at fl.motion::MotionBase/getValue()
at fl.motion::Animator3D/setTime3D()
at fl.motion::AnimatorBase/set time()
at fl.motion::AnimatorBase/nextFrame()
at fl.motion::AnimatorBase$/processCurrentFrame()
at fl.motion::AnimatorBase$/parentEnterFrameHandler()

as temporary solution i converted 3D tween to a frame-by-frame animation, but that doesn’t solve the problem.

Any idea?

i am working with 10.0.2 / Mac

Thanks
Sonja

The two key features seem to be changing the length of animations and applying easing - both of which however are so draconian that they make everything else a nightmare.

3dsmax does both these features so much more intuitively than Flash, and even After Effects (which has a pretty shit graph editor) manages it better than Flash.

The general interaction with the panel is atrocious as well, with property graphs popping open and shut the whole time, having to constantly drag the “viewable frames” wider when things change. Only being able to adjust one curve at a time. Not being able to drag and select multiple keyframes. Not being able to transform keyframes.

Animation was fairly rudimentary in older versions of Flash, but just when Adobe had an opportunity to make something really powerful that took inspiration from all the best animation packages out there they wasted everybody’s time, including their own.

I am honestly stunned at how bad and unintuitive it makes the process of animation. What a complete mess.

I find the entire CS4 package (Flash, photoshop, premiere etc) hard to operate after years of using pervious versions. The changes that were made to make things easier have only created ended crashes and headaches trying to relocate objects and functions we always used.

If you could let me know where Opacity went in Flash CS4, I would really appreciate it as would my grade 11 students.

1) Regarding #2 from my first post, after playing with things more, I figured that was the case. It’s too bad, but what the dev said makes perfect sense — when the .swf is created, a “snapshot” is taken of the Motion Tween that can’t be altered, kind of like when you right-click and select “Copy Motion as AS 3″. It would be nice, however, to be able to read those property arrays. It would allow you to, essentially, modify the animation by hand in the code. When creating a Motion Tween with code, you can use the addPropertyArray() function, but you don’t seem to be able to get those properties after the fact.

2) Related to the above, I would like to be able to duplicate a MotionBase so that I can alter it in code at runtime without affecting the original. Since the MotionBase constructor requires an XML, and since there isn’t a way to get the original MotionBase’s property arrays (to create a new one with), there doesn’t seem to be any way to create a duplicate Motion. Is there some way to do this that I haven’t found yet?

3) Regarding #1 from my first post, it’s good to hear that a potential fix is in the works. Since writing my initial post and doing a lot more testing, I’ve found similar issues with the other animator base methods. For example, if you stop or end one animator, all the others pause. If you pause one, they all pause and if you resume that same one, they all resume… but if you pause one and resume another, only the one resumed actually resumes. All these issues appear to be related to the same problem — individual animators being linked to each other somehow — so I hope the fix will take care of them all. I will definitely try it out as soon as the public beta is released!

4) I have also come up with another very important question since writing my last post. There seems to be no way to stop a motion tween in its tracks and remove it from the object. The stop() method puts the object back at the beginning of the tween, and the end() method jumps the object to the end of the tween. While pause() does stop the animation in its tracks, a resume() call would start the tween up again. I want to be able to remove the motion tween from the object entirely, while still leaving the object in its current state (mid-tween).

I really hope this is possible, because it’s essential for this new functionality to play nice with overlapping tweens (which our code base currently applies to objects using code alone). You see, everything we do is dynamic and it’s possible that there will be a case where a Motion Tween is applied to an object and then, before it is completed, a different type of animation is applied. I need to be able to stop the object where it is, drop the Motion Tween, and apply the new animation type at that point.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

@ AmandaM: Excellent questions! We’re very happy and excited to hear that you’re finding the tween instance feature useful (I love it myself too for everyday projects). I spoke with a developer about your questions, and this was the response I received:

1) It sounds like you’re running into a bug that may be fixed by a related issue in a future build. We have a public beta coming out soon, and according to the dev the bug should be fixed in that. If you were able to test your project in this when it’s out, http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/, it’d be great to confirm that’s indeed the case.

2) According to the dev, it’s not possible with the way things are currently implemented. ‘All the calculations are done by the flash application when it outputs the SWF and it factors in the number of frames when it does the math. All the AS code has is the final results of that math and not all the info about curves, eases, etc.’

Hope this helps, and let us know any other questions you have!

Thanks,
Jen.