Tail Animation Help!

[goat]

So, I'm trying to make a smooth tail animation and I'm not having much luck. is there anyway to make it move fluidly without the labor of frame-by-frame? I'm using AS2, so so shape tweens or bone tool? I tried making an art brush in illustrator and frame-by-frame animating, but it looks really jerky.

Here's a demo of it, it's supper rough, all of the 'buttons' are just for testing (changing from day to night etc.) the tan button controls a crude talk animation and all the red buttons are different expressions. for the tail I did a simple classic tween, but it looks really stiff, if you hit the last purple round button at the bottom she will transition to angry and her tail will twitch, this was my bad attempt at frame-by-frame (one with no delay followed by the same animation with 5 frames between each key frame)

Any help would be awesome, or any other feed back about stuff looking bad is great too (this is one of my first times animating)

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Spike Talk Model.swf [ 190.57 KiB | Viewed 1269 times ]

[OwnerOfSuccuby]

Nice work ! I am not good in animation of tails like this, i only know how some fluffy tails were animated - but may be that idea will work here too.

For now i am not good animator - but may be this links can help:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5RfxkaPpCQ

Bone tool:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h814ob7nCxo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-5mFGkbwWY

I do not like use the bone tool - but some times it can help.

Or may be it is possible for example not make animation frame by frame - but make - some kind of standart motion (select frames - right click - 3rd menu) - and animate only some part of tails movment. Then if you do not like some part of animation you can add intermediate correction frames that will make animation smother - for example.