Did your Play/Pause buttons stop working on your computer?

Dammit, computer....

So, here at my job, I have a Mac, and I play my Buckethead music through iTunes, much to the chagrin of my office mate.

I'll make you a Buckethead fan yet, Roommate!

However, lately, whenever I try to mute my music whenever someone walks into my office to ask me a question, my F8/Pause button does not work anymore! I wondered what was going on, and did some research.

I remembered that I had just updated my Google Play App on my Chrome Browser. I upgraded because it allows you to upload music to your Google Play account through your browser. Which is great, because I change my iTunes app a lot, and Play keeps EVERY DIFFERENT VERSION of a song I have... but that is another story.

What I FOUND, though, is that the Google Play app takes advantage of those very same media keys, so you can, for example, play and pause music playing on your browser through Google Play.

Nice, EXCEPT for one thing; it makes the shortcuts GLOBAL. Which means those shortcuts only work for Google Play. Therefore, it takes away the media keys functionality for iTunes, or any other music application you may be using the media keys for!

However, there is a rather easy way to fix and/or tweak that.

Edge Animate: What the HECK does the Toggle Pin Do?

I was having issues trying to follow the tutorial Animate 2: The Pin (sounds like a very bad movie sequel). I couldn't figure out what the heck it does until I saw this movie.

Supposedly, when you are on time 0 (I don't think Animate works with Frames...), you can drag the blue pin to another time area. Then, while still on time 0, you move the object (in this case it is an apple ) and it automatically creates keyframes and animation from time 0 to, say, 1 Second.

Check out the video, it'll clear things up.

Edge Animate tutorial: Animating with the Toggle Pin

Importing Sprite Sheets into Adobe Edge Animate

Yep, it is in Spanish. 

This official Adobe.tv video shows how to import a sprite sheet into Adobe Edge Animate.  This will create reusable sprites that can be reused throughout your project.

Use Flash CS6 to make Sprite Sheets

So, if you create an animation (say, a walk cycle) in Flash, you can export it as a Sprite Sheet. Sprite sheets can be used with most programs that create games.

SWF and After Effects, Sliders, AND DuIK Part 2

So, Now, for some reason, I am having issues rendering the SWF's in my After Effects program.

What the....?!?!

I did some research, and looked at some forum posts, and I even tested it out on another computer with Ae CS4 (which ended up working just fine). The only thing I can think of is that a plug-in I have is screwing up the rendering of SWF files.

SO... I am going to try and recreate the puppet with FXG files.
Yay.

SO, I put all the body parts in frame one of the Flash timeline, and exported a FXG. I then imported it into Adobe Illustrator.  I bypassed the issues I had before with body parts disappearing by making sure everything was broken up and (important) the vectors were colored with a color number, not a bitmap swatch (which I had done before to make it easier to universally change colors in Flash.)

I imported it into After Effects.  To recap:

SWF and After Effects, Sliders, AND DuIK Part 1

Go to http://ik.duduf.com and download the IK tools. Install the files in the scripts folder of After Effects: (win = c:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects\Support Files\Scripts”,  mac : “Applications/Adobe After Effects/Scripts/").

So I set that up and began working on my Flash file to see if I can export  my characters body parts and the head to be ready for flash.

I will first make a copy of my flash file. With the first copy I am going to delete everything except the head. I will keep the 378 Frames that I used to lip sync to a high quality audio file I received.

That's a lot of chatterin'!

I exported the head as a SWF file. Importing that into After Effects is no big issue. Once I put it in a Composition, I imported the audio file to the comp and named it  "Head". I then proceeded to create a new comp for the body.

MORE Flash to After Effects Experiment 02: Exporting FXG

I continued my tutorial (or more like "self-teaching") with Flash and FXG files. As stated in part one of this foray, I am starting off with all the parts of the character in separate layers.

I then moved the Anchor points of all the characters to have the rotation match the ones I had in Flash. A little tedious, but so far so good.

Once I did that, I made sure to parent the limbs in the correct manner in order to make sure, for example, the hand moved with the forearm when I rotated the upper arm. I did this with the pick whip.

What I did was this:

Rigging Characters: Tutorial By Daniel Gies

It looks like it uses Null objects to set the rotation points! Hm... interesting....

Here is the code for the Null Objects:

n=thisComp.layer("Name_of_Null_Object")
nullpos=n.toComp(n.anchorPoint);
fromComp(nullpos);

Flash Animation Tutorial #1, Setup your file - Alex Butera

These tutorials give the basicis on getting started with Linear Animation in Flash, and also discusses After Effects intergration.

The author:
alexbutera.tumblr.com
twitter.com/AlexButera

Flash Tutorials On Traditional Animation

Flash to After Effects Experiment 02: Exporting FXG

FXG

A FXG file is a "new" file that Flash exports, instead of the usual Adobe Illustrator filetype (.ai).  Why Adobe did this? I don't know.

So, with that, I fired up Illustrator and saw how it imported. 

What the...?

It did not import the forearm. I decided to go back to Flash and break up the symbol that had all the arm shapes in it and put each symbol in it's own layer.  I also decided to draw a new hand with the fingers separated (for another test I want to see...)

That's a little better...

Flash to After Effects Experiment 01: Exporting Characters?

So, I did some stuff a LOOOOONG time ago with some STTNG Characters drawn by Josh Howard.   I worked in Flash tracing out the character of Data, trying to make animatable character for me to use for cartoons.

Well, I let things go a little bit--starting College up again and all--and never did finish up.

However, I have been doing some thinking, and I wondered if there is a way to import characters I draw up in Flash into After Effects and animate them there, using AEs powerful effects and the like.  There are a few different ways to do animation in AE, so I wasn't sure which one I should use.

So, I decided to try some experiments to see if it would work. I made a new FLA with just one frame. I splayed out the arms and legs of Data so I can try out different types of animation.

Mozilla Popcorn

From hacks.mozilla.org

This week Mozilla is in London at the Mozilla Festival 2012. A year ago at last year’s Festival, we released Popcorn.js 1.0, and with it a way for filmmakers, journalists, artists, and bloggers to integrate audio and video into web experiences. Popcorn has since become one of the most popular ways to build time-based media experiences for the web. It has proven to be uniquely powerful for bespoke web demos, films, visualizations, etc. This year, we’ve come to the Mozilla Festival with an even bigger 1.0 release: Popcorn Maker 1.0.

Here is a quick and dirty video I did. I pulled a video from youtube and put some dialogue bubbles... only a few. Not exactly a very exciting foray, but a foray nonetheless.

Trying to learn: Adding more code!

This is lesson 5 (Link).

This video further expands on the facial expressions controls and builds some relationships between them like having a blink affect the eye brows and the cheeks or a smile slider affect the mouth, the jaw and the cheeks all at the same time without having to animate them independently.

CODE IN EACH NULL OBJECT ATTACHED TO PUPPET PINS:  

1. Go to the Null Object that corresponds with the names below.
2. Copy the code that corresponds to the Null Object below. 
3. Alt+Click on Position Stopwatch to paste code in blank.
4. Profit.

ALL THE SLIDERS, BY NAME

Blink, MouthShape, Jaw, Smile, Eyebrows, Anger, Cheeks. Then make new ones by the names EyeBrowsRT and EyeBrowsLFT.  


ALL THE CODE THAT GOES INTO THE NULL OBJECTS THAT ARE ATTACHED TO THE PUPPET PINS ON THE HEAD COMPOSITION

Trying to Learn: Preventing Distortion with the Puppet Pin and Starch Pin tool

Supposedly this will teach me to Apply Expressions to the Sliders that I addded to the Null Objects to prevent too much distortion to the Puppet Pins. (Link)

What'd I just say?

Update: This lesson used the Puppet Pins and Starch Pins to prevent too much distortion when you use the Null objects to distort the face.

Red Dots are the Starch pins, the Yellow X are the Puppet pins.  The yellow X with a red "null" box attached to them are the animatable distortion areas of the face.

Video Follows:

Trying to Learn: Puppet Pins and Null Objects

Part 2:  Attaching Null objects to the eyes and mouth, then attaching sliders to the null objects. (link)

Part 3: Creating Puppet Pins to distort the face, and attaching null objects to pins to use sliders. (link)

ADD THIS BIT OF CODE to the pins, by right clicking the position "clock" and add this to the expression area. then highlight the layer name (in red) and pick whip to the correct layer:

n = thisComp.layer(“layerToFollow”);
nullpos = n.toComp(n.anchorPoint);
fromComp(nullpos);

Trying to Learn: Rigging a After Effects Character part 1

Started the first lesson of Creating and Rigging a character for animation in After Effects. (Link). I have also found some interesting plugins, as well: