Re: FLASH: illustrator shapes

[John Dowdell]

At 10:30 AM 7/14/0, Anthony Faust wrote:

>if I want to make a polygon type shape and wanted to animate it, what's the

>best way to make sure that the file size would be the smallest?

>should i make it in illustrator and import it into flash or should i make

>the shape in flash itself?


Should be pretty much the same... regular polygons would be described in

the same number of curves regardless.


Related notes:


--  If shape-morphing, then making your target shapes in whichever app, but

use the shape-tweening in Flash instead of blending in Illustrator and

importing each separate shape, to avoid a potential filesize hit.


--  For complicated shapes drawn elsewhere, please do examine the shape in

Macromedia Flash to see if it can be simplified, broken apart, have its

curves optimized, more. (Consider a squiggly green shape atop a blue

square... in the final SWF this might be more concisely expressed as two

shapes, rather than the normal knockout approach!)


--  If coming from Adobe's Illustrator, you may wish to compare filesizes

from various paths... we can transfer via .AI6 format, or the free

FlashWriter Export Plugin, and ILL9 advertises some type of SWF export (I

haven't personally evaluated ILL9's SWF, but have read mixed reports...

please test in your own work).


--  If coming from another tool, you can often get better results by

importing just the curves, and then applying gradients or other features in

Flash itself.



jd




John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US

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