The above is an Inverse Kinematics example authored with Flash CS4 that doesn’t use any (of my) code.  The robot just seemed fitting with the domain.

Having looked at David Stiller’s tutorial and Lee Brimelow’s blog on the subject, I decided to see how easy it would be to do something similar to David Stiller’s puppet of Tom but allow the user to drag the pieces around like in Lee Brimelow’s example.  After hunting around for the way to make the pieces draggable without using any code, it turns out it’s really easy: look at the Property panel on the Armature layer and change “Type” from “Authortime” to “Runtime.”  Probably this is in the help somewhere, but I just stumbled across it on my own.

For more info visit Adobe’s Flash CS4 Help on Inverse Kinematics.

Download the source (version 0.2).

Note: I have recently updated the swf so it uses vectors rather than bitmaps so you can more easily do the selection.  If anyone can figure out how to combine the runtime method with the authortime method so you can have your puppet fly in and then allow the user to move it around, please let me know — I was having difficulties with this.  I assume it can be done by using several swf files rather than a single one.   Also I found out that skewed movieclips in your armature can have unwanted side effects.