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In order to create animated tweens for the IK chain you need to use functions provided in the iK'motion control panel. The control panel is a user interface that lets you lock down specific bones, undo/redo chain movement, and start new chains as well as creating and re-creating animations.
To open the control panel interface, go to Window > Other Panels > iK'motion. The panel below appears in Flash:
If you already have an IK chain defined on the stage, the panel will reflect the current setup and look more like this:
If you do have a chain defined and the panel indicates 'no segments found', select 1 or more bones in the chain and press the sync button (the 2 circular arrows) to refresh the panel.
A description of each of the items in the interface:
- 'Segment' box: Displays the name of the 'anchor' bone of the current chain (segment) being worked with.
- Sync button (2 gold circular arrows): Refreshes the mini-display and selects a default chain if one is found and none is currently selected.
- Lock button: Enters or exits 'lock mode'. The button turns green when in 'lock mode'. In lock mode, clicking bones in the mini-display area (the blue square) toggles lock mode on or off. A locked bone cannot be moved when lower level bones are being dragged. Locked bones are marked as red:
- DUPLICATE SEGMENT: Copies and pastes all movie clips in the currently selected chain. A new layer is created for each copied 'bone' and names are changed to avoid duplicates.
- NEW SEGMENT button: Begins a new IK chain. After pressing this button the next selection with a the picker tool of a movie clip that is not already part of an IK chain will define a new anchor, and thus a new chain. In the control panel, 'Segment' and 'chain' both refer to a connected set of bones.
- CLEAR IK: Removes all IK information from the currently selected movie clips on the stage. Once IK info is cleared on a movie clip instance, the clip is no longer affected by any iK'motion functions. Animations created before IK info was cleared will still run as previously defined however.
- LOOP ANIMATION: Causes position and rotation information from the first available frame where this chain can be found to be copied and pasted to the current frame. It then creates a new tween, essentially doing a 'ReAnimate' on the current frame. Use the loop function to create precise looping animations where the 'ends meet'.
- SPLIT ANIMATION: (Not available in trial version). This is an advanced feature that lets you 'split up' a tween into 2 separate tweens. To use the feature select a frame somewhere in the middle of a tween already established with the 'ReAnimate' button. Make sure you have the correct segment selected in the control panel (if not, select a bone in the segment and click the Sync button). Then click the 'Split Animation' button and you will see something like this in your timeline:
The motion guide path has been cleared to allow you to make adjustments to your IK chain on the frame of the split and remind you that a 'ReAnimate' is necessary. Once you make the appropriate adjustments, hit 'ReAnimate', then hit 'ReAnimate' again on the following keyframe (which in the above image would be frame 20). This is a must- If you don't 'ReAnimate' the ActionScript will not be generated to reflect your changes. An alternative to hitting 'ReAnimate' twice is to use 'ReAnimate All'.
- ReANIMATE: Assuming you have created new keyframes to be used as the 'end point' of a tween, this button generates a tween on the timeline for all bones in the chain. If a tween already exists at the current frame, it is recreated to incorporate any changes you may have made. ActionScript code is also generated in its own layer to drive the tween when the movie is exported. See the section below for more information.
Before using the ReAnimate function, it's important to set up your keyframes properly. For the most part, ReAnimate works the same way as applying a Motion Tween in flash: you create keyframes at the frame where you would like the animation to end, you position objects in their final position and orientation, and then you create the tween. The same procedure applies with iK'motion except instead of using Flash's 'Create Motion Tween' you hit the ReANIMATE button after you're happy with the final positions of the objects.
Remember to position your bones in the newly created keyframes with the iK'motion Picker Tool.
The timeline after ReANIMATE has been applied to a chain with three bones and a null cap at frame 15 and then again at frame 30.
In order to show the IK tween in the timeline, Guide layers are generated that serve the purpose of providing a guiding curve as a motion path for each bone in the chain to move along. By default the guide layers are invisible to avoid over-complicating the scene. Making the guide visible reveals a curved line that is used as the motion path. Scrubbing through the timeline allows you to preview the tween animation as you would with a normal motion tween. However, the tweens you see in preview mode are not exact representations of the animation, and you may see bones appear to separate as the tween progresses. This will not occur when the movie is exported because the animation is driven by ActionScript code. See the next section for a description of the code that is generated.
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