Thank you for the “snapping” solutions :)

I have also contacted Justin. It seems to be a pretty tricky question.
For now I’ve added a request using the form on the Adobe website(https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform)
Either the updated position would be returned when using fl.getDocumentDOM().translate3DSelection()
or jsfl access for the clipboard used by Copy Properties/Paste Properties would be some nice solutions.

Thanks again,
George

Regarding the 3D properties+JSFL, I’m not sure off the top of my head. Mayhew has left Adobe, so I’ll have to ask around a bit and hope I’ll find an answer :) This may sound pretty weird, but I know Justin Putney has played a lot with JSFL and may have experimented in this area.

Thanks for the help. Did the first part 2D and the second part 3D, worked great!

About the snapping, what I did was this:
- match the keyframes to the traced material
- smooth out the path
- apply easing
- try to get the keyframes close to the traced material, now with easing applied.
Thanks for explaining how the easing works. If I turn off easing and make adjustments, then re-apply the ease, then wouldn’t the easing affect the adjustments ? At the moment the tweens are ‘close’ enough. They have the right feel to them(right easing, depth, similar position), so I might leave it like that. Since it’s animation, I doubt pixel perfect matching will be visible anyway.

I’m afraid I have another trick question that hopefully you can direct to John Mayhew. It would be amazing if I could access the 3D properties of a clip from JSFL. The problem is once a clip goes into ‘3d mode’, properties like x and y become useless.
Also, using fl.getDocumentDOM().translate3DSelection(); returns nothing, although I wished it would return the new position. In the timeline context menu there is a CopyProperties/PasteProperties. I’m curious where the clipboard for that is stored, or how I can access it.
A slightly more details version of this question is posted here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2629871/how-can-i-retrieve-a-movieclip-3d-position-via-jsfl

I imagine things are busy so no worries :)

Once again, thank you for all the help!

All the best,
George

With the snapping thing, it looks like you have ease applied there – if you turn off ease, I would suspect the behavior would stop. When you add easing, there’s math adjusting the tweens while you edit them which can explain “unexpected” behavior on the Stage. You drag something, and then Math says “ok, then the animation with the ease needs to be interpolated like this” and the object will move to where it needs to be. You may want to turn off easing, make your adjustment, and then turn easing back on. Or, you may want to do edits in the Motion Editor, as the dotted graph will update to show you the “real” value.

As for the onion skin, I wouldn’t be able to tell or get this fixed without the file unfortunately. Maybe there’s some magic combination of ease and 3D that causes the stage not to update correctly…

Thanks for the info! Sorry for the delay, this particular comment was in the moderation queue and I missed it until logging in for a long overdue post :(

A bit late,
but Happy Easter :)

for (1) Yes, I am trying to create a motion tween that will match a frame-by-frame animation(a rendered set of images). I am aware of the vanishing point, I tried to match it as best as I could. Unfortunately I cannot link to the animation I need to ‘trace’, but it’s simple enough: a clip fading and moving in a spiral motion (Z included). It could be done easily in 2D, using scale as Z, but later the same clip will need to rotate on its X axis. I’ve placed a simple tween here to illustrate the idea: http://disturbmedia.com/george/tests/planeSpiralTest.html

for (2) Snapping is off (CMD + /) to check all snap options. Here’s a short video of what my problem is:
http://www.screencast.com/users/orgicus/folders/Jing/media/f036ccb4-376e-40bd-a840-e1f399d0f43e

Don’t know where that snapping is from, suspecting is something going wrong with the cs4 tween interpolation,but not sure if it’s a bug, or I’m just not doing things the right way(in the right order). There’s seems to be a lot of planning involved with these new tweens.

This post explains scaling and moving the new motion tweens :D so that should do most of the things done by Edit Multiple frame I guess. Not sure what I’m doing wrong, but in some cases onion skinning doesn’t work, video link here:
http://www.screencast.com/users/orgicus/folders/Jing/media/ce026fbf-a580-401c-b0ed-c4458ed33365

Thanks for the help!

I’m not sure about why onion skinning isn’t working – it does for new tweens, including those with 3D. Perhaps you could provide steps with an example FLA to show what’s not working for you. Edit multiple frames won’t work for a single tween instance, it will work on the first frame of multiple tweens. Each tween only has one object and edit multiple frames works on objects, which is why it only affects the first frame of a tween. However, most things you would do with it can be handled using the new model (we’ve found that almost all operations “old school” are negated with the new object-based model). Please let me know what workflow you’re trying to do with Edit Multiple and I’ll try to outline a new-school way of doing it :)

questions:

1. what’s the best way to match a motion tween to an animation from a series of images(like a spiral animation, z included) ?
2. how do you disable Z snapping for a keyframe of a motion tween ?

I tried the following:
1. created a motion tween
2. picked equidistant keyframes and matched the clip to the underlying image.
3. smoothed the path using the bezier handles

at this point, I have keyframes in the right place, at the right time, no easing yet, so it all looks jerky.

4. I added a bit of ease out, so some keyframes are miss aligned

I tried to re-align the keyframes, bad idea, it all goes wrong. Can’t use the 3d translate tool(G), it snaps in a weird manner, can’t use the property inspector, when I adjust X and Y, Z adjusts itself and I don’t understand why.

my clip is simple (a rectangle), the start and end keyframes are at rounded pixel positions, pivot and transformation point are at centre.

Can I please either get some hints on the right approach to do this, either a way to disable that odd snapping behavior ?

Also, can’t seem to do onion skinning, or edit multiple frames on movieclips that have 3d transforms. Any replacements for these really handy ‘oldschool’ techniques to match animations ?

Thanks in advance,
George

I used to use the ‘edit multiple frames’ selection to scale the whole project down at the same time. But if i do that using the new tweening method, all the motion paths stay the same and do not scale along with the objects on stage.

Any help would be sweeeet.

Rob