Flash CS4 rundown - list of up coming features
You can see the presentation demo of Adobe Flash CS4 here: http://tv.adobe.com/vi+f1556v1685
But if you’re too lazy, I’ve done a run through of the features.
Features of Flash CS4:
- Object-based animation - Adobe’s new animation model, a.k.a ‘new motion feature’. Basically you can right click something and add motion tween. Not too exciting.
- 3d trasformation - new 3d capabilities in Flash CS4. Can go from a simple tween animation, grab the 3d transform tool and ‘rotate’ the graphic around a y, x and z axis. It just looks like doing fancy skewing on the object and animates in, however I’m sure the code side of things will be a lot more poweful.
- Motion editor - there is a new ‘motion view’ that has individual control for every property that is animated, much the same way that is done in the timeline in programs such as 3d max. This is going to be an awesome feature. It is about time that Flash let you edit the curves of animations and tweening in a simple way, I’m looking forward to this feature.
- Bones tool - actually inverse kinematics, lets you ‘tie together’ differen objects. You create ‘bones’ through simples to link them together, allowing you to animate objects, gives them movement constraits etc. The ‘bones tool’ is supported in runtime, so on the front end of the Flash website the objects with bones will still be able to be manipulated. This is an okay feature, might be hand for frame-by-frame animations; you won’t have to have isolate different objects in groups within groups within groups to create animations anymore. This will probably also have some exciting impacts on Flash games.
- Motion presets - can save and apply different animations to objects. Flash will set up the key frames for the animation on that object. I think this feature could be useful, at least saving time by not having to recreate animation styles manually.
- Deco tool - the ‘deco tool’ allows you to create patterns from Flash objects in a grid or symetrically around an axis. This is going to make so many things so much easier. One of the hardest things to do in Flash as far as illustration goes is create good looking textures. Duplicating symbols and having the manually rotate and position them is very time consuming. I’m looking forward to the deco tool.
- Spray brush tool - lets you select a symbol from the library and apply random scale and rotation to it. Works in the same way as brushes do in photoshop. Once again, this is going to be a valuable addition for illustrators/animators.
- H.264 video support - the import > video has been enhanced. It allows you to add videos that have been compressed in the H.264 into Flash without having to recompress the video as flv files.
- Adobe AIR Authoring - lets you deploy Flash as desktop applications. Lets you take any existing applications from Flash into Adobe AIR. In the Publish Settings you can export as Air 1.0 instead of Flash Player 10. Lets you run Flash as you would for a desktop application, gives you options for other features. I’ve used AIR already, and it’s pretty cool.
If you’re an animator or illustrator, there are loads of new stuff for you to play with, but they haven’t really announced anything for the programming side of Flash yet. There are some nice features, but as it is, I don’t think CS4 is worth the upgrade.
Filed under: Adobe, Air, Flash, News | No Comments »