On this document, I will be showing a tutorial on how to make an animation using the Bone tool in Adobe Flash. First, open Adobe Flash in ActionScript 3.0:
Next draw a simple image that will be used as your animation. Once you have done that, convert all of your images that you are using to animate into Symbols (Movie Clips). I have drawn a stick man for my project:
Next, select the bone tool and select the main area of where all the other objects pivot around. In this case, since my animation is a stick man, then the main pivot area is the neck.
From this, I can move the arms around in any direction I like without them straying from rest of the body. (unless you have the Transform tool selected) You may notice at this point that the body may move while you are moving the arms. To stop this, select the main pivot areas outer circle (with the Select tool selected) and it will highlight it. You will then have some new options in the properties window. One of those options is called Joint: Rotation and there should also be a box ticked enabled. Click the box to disable the rotation of the body. (Do this before adding the bone feature to the legs)
("Just so you know, I'm using the arm to refer the Joint: Rotation because I had done the neck earlier and I can't see a way to redo it, probably because my shapes are too small!") Now that you have done this, you can now add the bone feature to the legs. Now to add some animations: go into the Timeline and you should notice a new layer has appeared called Armature_2 (or you may have noticed it when you were inputting the bone features)
At this point, add some frames in and manipulate your animation and you should have something like this:
When you now hit Ctrl + Enter, you'll see a small loop animation of this stick man waving.
