Creating and Importing Art for
Flash
There are many ways of creating and importing
your art or drawings into Flash and I use different techniques with
regard to the type of art that's being used, or just my particular mood
or whim at that moment. Usually the type of art that dictates how it
will be introduced, whether it will be scanned with PhotoImpact or Photoshop
and "vectorized" for further work in Adobe Illustrator, then
imported into Flash. Or maybe drawn directly within Flash using a sketch
as a guide on a locked layer (my least favorite method), or maybe importing
a large jpg image and let let Flash do a Bitmap Trace on it to "vectorize"
it.
Using Bitmap Trace in Flash to convert
a .jpg image has the advantage of speed, but can have a couple of drawbacks.
The one advantage is speed; it saves the steps of either drawing within
Flash directly, or converting with Streamline or Freehand MX.
If the jpg has color, especially as gradients,
using Bitmap Trace will result in an object that is larger in size in
file size than the original bitmap and may look worse. The idea of vectorizing
art is of course to reduce the overall file size and give it editability
within Flash. If a bitmap file must be converted to a vector art, it
should consist of outlines. Flash will trace it quite well. The Optimize
or Smooth commands can make the lines look better and reduce the file
size and the paint bucket can fill in the colors.
The second potential challenge is that
Flash may not convert say a nice black art outline that was scanned
in into solid vector lines. There's a tendency for the less black pixels
to be converted into gray areas of the vector lines which can look kinda
weird. Flash prefers nice solid black lines to convert, whereas conversion
done with Adobe Streamline 4 is better. The secret with using Streamline
4 is using a .TIF file that is one meg or larger; files that are smaller
than say 1/2 meg will be distorted by Streamline when converted.
Working with PhotoImpact or Photoshop,
then Streamline 4, then Illustrator is covered in the below Flash tutorial.
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