Should I bother learning Flash, or is flash on its way out?
Flash feels dead to be desu
>>254830
Flash, you mean Adobe Animation?
>>254832
yes?
>>254830
Flash is dead
Learn After Effects or Toon Boom instead
From what I understand Adobe Animate is the successor of Flash and will be mostly the same UI, If you learn flash youll know a good deal of Adobe Animate. If you enjoy flash you can use flash CS6 and newer to publish things in HTML which is still useful.
tl;dr
Flash player is dead, flash the program not so much.
Although Flash support is kinda dying out, that doesn't mean that animating in Flash and exporting as a movie file is off the table. Flash/Animate is still a pretty good animation software.
Flash Player, notably on the web, is on its way out
Flash (the animator) in itself is getting rebranded as "Animate", and it's still a top-notch vector animator tool. Still very good for animating assets for video games and/or making cartoons/whatever
Can't comment on Toon Boom
After Effects is awesome but its concepts are entirely different and it's not really meant for traditional animation.
I'd say if you want to be an animator, learn Flash/Animate. If you want to make arcade games or cool shit on the web, forget it, those days are never coming back.
Same comment as the others about Flash Player. RIP.
However, Flash is a 20 year old animation program, and is still the best animation program for 'quick and dirty. It can be surprisingly versatile.
Flash - soon to be Adobe Animate has h5 support, so making banners (where the money's at) in a post-flashpocalypse web is still high in demand. And there are very few of us.
AE on the other hand is incredibly more powerful in regards to animation and post production. AE is the commercial choice.
>>254845
Correct, adobe is re-creating flash and edge animate into "Animate CC". Animate CC will output as HTML5, swf and up to 4k video. They said they were releasing it in Q1 2016.
If Web:
Animate CC + Google Web Designer
If Video only:
After Effects
>>254965
i get your point but technically there's nothing stopping you from using AE-exported MP4s or WEBMs on the Web too.
You can still use Flash to create Android/iOS games. Which still a pretty cool skill to have, especially since the drawing tools in it are so powerfull so you get to create great graphics.
I don't know about any other app creation software so I could be very wrong.
>>254918
AE is not more powerfull than Flash in terms of animating though.
Unless you're doing some lame shit like kinetic typography with overused motion blur effects or have to add animation to video footage. But then you're better off using C4D and compiling that stuff in AE.
>>255129
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXxh6OsamhY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVrYyX3bHI8
https://vimeo.com/102469816
https://vimeo.com/114780936
>>255129
>AE is not more powerfull than Flash in terms of animating though.
Are you insane?
Ever used Expressions?
Ever taken advantage of parent/child-layer relations?
Ever used the literally hundreds of Effect presets?
I remember my professors telling me that flash was dead back in 2010 and what do you know? Six years later and it's still grasping on.
Learn java.
>>255130
Those Vimeo links proove my point. Most of the animation in those videos are done in 3D programs (I'm assuming C4D) and then compiled in AE for post processing.
After Effects is not very good when it comes down to generating its own images, it's amazing in terms of manipulation, but not building things from scratch.
The same way Photoshop is a powerfull image editing tool, but don't expect it to be very good at creating Illustrator-tier creations.
Honestly, you can't compare Flash and After Effects. Both are very good at what they need to do.
>>255131
Allright I stand corrected. I better get back to ditching Flash and get on the After Effects train.
It's just that I'm so used to Flash and I can achieve the same results by doing it manually.
All the presets are numbers and math to me, and I enjoy doing things visually, eyeballing it.
I know it's not the right way, but I'm so used to it, it's hard to unlearn it.
>>255133
I did this in After Effects. Could you imagine doing the same in Flash while still maintaining the layer relations so everything was still easily editable?
>>254855
This.
You guys are too concerned with means disregarding the ends.
Use what you can work best, the ends are what count.
Reality is most of you will end up working outside of design, it's a saturated and competitive industry, the few who have the self marketing skills will freelance while working some other job, the fewer still will make it in to a firm. Odd balls with a wide skill set range will end up in house, but most of you will be shit.
But most of you will lie in ruin, so use what you like the best, because the completed task is more important than the way you completed it.
>>255149
>Spine 2D Animations
>Fucking amazing
http://esotericsoftware.com/
People can be referring to one of two things when they say "Flash".
Flash player itself is dead.
Flash the Adobe program itself is still great and will still be usable for years to come because you can export other file types
>>255224
what are you implying?
>>255227
That you try Spine for any of your 2d animating needs. I was introducted to it at the GGJ and it is the coolest shit I've seen for a 2d game/animation.
>Normal maps for 2d sprite = the shit
>>255233
not him but gotta agree on that
pic related: from Super Mario Maker's asset files.
Betcha thought they were models?
>>255233
that bone-based shit looks cheap as hell. Just learn properly animate, you'll be better off for it.
>>255249
not if you know what you're doing.
Both, traditional animation and bone-based animation can be beautiful. Both can be equally shit too, though.
>>255260
Well, it's true that if you already know how to animate properly (bit of a catch-22, because that'll probably never happen if you only use BBA), your bone-based animations won't look completely shit, but even with a great animator it looks hella cheaper than real animation.
99% of the BBA I see is terrible and has no smears, stretching, secondary motions, follow-through, and even among the better stuff I've seen, there was never any I would classify as "beautiful"
>>255200
that is entirely depressing even if true
>>255262
Well, if you were to animate assets for something mechanical or rigid like >>255149 it would take exponentially more effort (and time) to draw all the frames by hand (not just walking – turning etc. too) not to mention if you change your mind about some part you can't fix it easily because you don't have typical node relationships.
>>255275
Once you get good at drawing and animating, it's barely more effort. Remember, rigging, frame-switching and FFD used in bone-based animations also takes a lot of time (especially setting up the rig) and you might need to have several rigs from different perspectives.
And in the end, the results will still be vastly inferior because you still don't get all the niceness you just get "basically for free" from real animation, like smears, double-ups, secondary motion, follow-throughs, elastic-looking deformations, frame-precise timings, ...
That BBA is hugely faster than normal animation is just a meme with people who can't draw for shit. If you want it to look even remotely acceptable, you're gonna spend a huge amount of time, whereas an experienced animator can pump out frames like it ain't no thing.
To be fair, it is easier to get into (getting quick but poor results), though. And if you need procedural animations (adapting arms and head to follow mouse-cursor or attach to stuff etc), there sometimes isn't a way around BBA.
I use flash all the time for animations, -just the basic ones like stickman animations-.
But for me the program works fine, if you want some more advanced animations you'd better use AE
>>255277
I agree on most points but..
> an experienced animator can pump out frames like it ain't no thing.
Even so –to get a single second of fluid animation on a 60fps game/video, you would need to sketch, draw and color sixty separate frames. Even if you were a super professional, it is practically impossible to not lose your mind while doing this.
I tried looking for examples of hand drawn 60fps but couldn't find any. I can't remember if Wario Land Shake It was 60fps, but even if it was I doubt the animations were.
>>255135
Why unlearn flash? Just use both.
>>255277
>an experienced animator can pump out frames like it ain't no thing.
Go fuck yourself. It takes about a week to get ten seconds of animation out and still have it look good. It's not just time, either. drawing that much under a deadline is fucking exhausting.
>>254830
animate cc
