Animating with Flash MX

For starters, this book is for anyone (and by that I mean beginner level through advanced) who wants to do digital animation. I am a c++ programmer and so I approach flash from a developer's point of view.

I am more into ActionScripts and while that is a good thing, you still need to add basic, thorough techniques that are used/have been used by animators to your set of tools.

Enter Animating with Flash - Professional Creative Animation Techniques. While the first few chapters may be skipped by developers/designers who have intermediate to advanced experience with flash and other technologies, with tips like "If [Macromedia] Fireworks could do nothing else, I would still use it every single day for crunching images.", everyone who reads this book from cover to cover is sure to come away with a thing or two they probably didn't know.

The book starts by outlining and defining the roles of the common tools available to the digital animator; Flash/Photoshop etc.

Chapters 2 to 6 introduce and explain story boarding, 2D and 3d character animation, sound and lip synching. Readers would be treated to invaluable animation techniques. If you thought this book was only about flash, well you will get a lot of add-ons in the author's treatment of poser and swift 3d. The section on story boarding is excellent. The character animation section; superb. The lip syncing and facial expressions chapter (chapter 6) is also treated thoroughly.

Chapters 7 and 8 show how interactivity can be added to the animation you create by introducing ActionScripts and components. Newbies will get a tutorial on program control constructs such as "if" "while" etc. More advanced users may skip these chapters.

If you have always wanted to create that "wobble' effect you find on buttons on some web pages and a host of others like bubbles/snow etc, chapter 9 is your place. It presents a host of mouth-watering scripts that readers can learn from, modify and apply to their own projects.

In the rest of this 15-chapter book, the author goes on to explain Dynamic animation, Internet/video, Games development, The Pocket PC, iTV and Typography for the animator.

Clearly, this book leaves no stones unturned. Readers can also draw from the case studies and showcase presented at the end of the book.

Each chapter has accompanying .fla files (flash format files) that you can play around with and see what's going on more clearly.

Overall, this book is an excellent read. It has 15 chapters of useful flash and digital animation information. I recommend it to the newbie to the flash environment as well as the programmer who wants to get a few creative techniques under his/her belt.
Grab the book at Amazon.com

 

 

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