Creating a rig that’s suitable for use in Flash is always a balancing act between functionality and expressiveness. You might spend your time creating a rig that works with all of Flash’s strengths and limitations, only to find that you can’t do anything with it besides generic looking symbol animation. On the other hand, you may have decided try for a rig that’s more expressive. You’ve separated your rig into a millions pieces; you’ve even got shape tweening for individual strands of hair. When it comes time to moving the character however, it becomes too cumbersome and you’re forced to compromise on all that detailed animation you planned for. A good rig should be a fine balance of both and appropriately detailed to the scale of the project.

Flash is very capable traditional animation software, so why use a rig in the first place? The number one reason for me is time. While symbol animation compromises on finer detailed movement, it makes up for it in economy. To make a film like Tarboy, symbol animation is much more practical to my workflow.

For the characters in Tarboy 2, I wanted a higher degree of flexible movement, such as movable shoulders and a bendable torso. I also wanted each of the joints in the arms and legs to be able to rotate a full 360 degrees, so this needed to be factored into the design of the character. This meant that each of these joints needed to be a perfect circle, so no angled joints in the elbows, shoulders or knees. The benefit of using this method, is that if I wanted to really lift the arm, I wouldn’t need to swap out a new arm symbol once the joint reaches it’s limits. Because the arm has a 360 degree range of motion, I’ve removed all shadows from the arms and legs. Otherwise, once the symbol rotates 180 degrees, a shadow that exists on the under side of the arm would now be on top. If I wanted to, I could make several variations of this symbol with varied shadows, and swap them out depending on the angle of the arm. In the end, I decided it would be too messy for a detail that would be barely noticed.

The torso is broken in to three segments; the hips, the waist and the chest. At the ends of each symbol are more ball joints, that allow me to create rotating arcs in the body. For Nash’s character, I wanted him to have a strong hunch, but wanted the rig to be expressive enough that it could bend in the opposite direction if his mood was to dramatically change. The shoulder area is another place I wanted some control, so that when Nash raises his arm, it can flow properly into the torso. I can also raise or lower the shoulders to make him seem tense or relaxed.

In the end, it takes a bit more time to move all of these parts around in Flash, but the degree of control I have makes up for it. I’d like to use more hybrid techniques, using more traditional animation for some of the features. I’m trying to bring something new to each shot to keep the drawings fresh, as symbol animation can look a bit repetitive after a while.

Tarboy 2 is nearly 50 percent complete, and so far we’re on schedule to getting it released this year.