[Herr Kurm]

Today is the first day in my life I opened flash and made a small banner. Flash has been dead easy so far (figuring out how to make shit move was a matter of minutes) but when I publish (export) it the imported objects from Illustrator look fucking awful. I exported the objects to .swf and then imported to stage in Flash, cranked the JPG quality to the max in publish settings and here you can see the result:

ImageShack - Hosting :: banner1sq9.swf

If you dont see the bullshit on the glyphs try viewing it in 1600x1200. What amazes me the most is that the logo itself in the end looks perfect, the other two sentences have fucking big artefacts.

Any help is appreciated.

PS: I had a very little time to do this and the client pays me enough so that I dont want to argue with him about the style, I know myself that this banner is pure bollocks, you dont have to mention it.

EDIT: I almost forgot that I cranked the curve quality to the max too in Illustrator export dialog

[John Good]

flatten everything in illustrator,
then export with AI File to SWF file.
(You must select curve Quality 10 and Preserve Appearance instead of Editability).

Then in flash you must use the import command.
if it still sucks, no solution baby. That's the way it is...

[Herr Kurm]

yep, thats the way I did it previously. I´m not going to draw all of this in Flash again with those pathetic tools Flash has, I will try to find a solution.

[John Good]

making bitmaps can be a good solution. swf will be a bit more heavy, but you save processor !

[hawken]

gradient fills on text? Just asking for trouble.

maybe it's because you are breaking the symbols after importing to flash. Don't break them up. Try copy and pasting from illustrator to flash, as is. They will probably look fine.

[John Good]

Originally Posted by hawken

Try copy and pasting from illustrator to flash, as is.

this works once in a million.

[Herr Kurm]

I have tried copy - paste from Illustrator to Flash... it gets really wierd.

Tho when I zoom in on the objects in flash i see that the curves are perfect, the shit appears only on the final render.

[emil]

Get buzz to make you a decent one.

[Herr Kurm]

you, my dear sir, are evil

[emil]

Right tool for the right job and all that

[Mandy Moo]

It seems to me that it's just the text that is in poor quality. Can't you just do type it and stylize it in Flash (or is it not an existing font)? Or how about trying to import it in Flash and then trace bitmap so that the bitmap turns into a vector image.

[John Good]

Originally Posted by Mandy Moo

trace bitmap.

that works once in a billion

[Herr Kurm]

The type itself is brilliant quality, at least on the drawingboard in Flash, this shit appears after exporting it. The type itself is slightly modified helvetica rounded

*ducks

redrawing it in flash is not an option. Just for the kicks - how do i trace bitmaps in Flash?

Just another question about the syntax of actionscript, Im trying to get it to link to a site. Should the code for the invisible button layer look like this or am I on the wrong end of the rope

button.onRelease = function() {
getURL("http://www.google.com", window="_blank");
}

[emil]

on (release) {
getURL ("http:..www.google.com/", "_blank");
}

you need to place this action on your button.

[Herr Kurm]

thanks a lot will try it out now

[emil]

Macromedia Flash - ActionScript Dictionary : getURL

[Mandy Moo]

Originally Posted by Herr Kurm

Just for the kicks - how do i trace bitmaps in Flash?

Import the bitmap, select it, Modify>Bitmap>Trace Bitmap

A dialog box opens

I normally type in 10 for the Colour Theshold and 1 for the Minimum Area. To me that is the closest result but you should experiment with that and the other options until you are happy.

[Herr Kurm]

Argh, cant get the invisible button working. Ive created a button into the library (insert - new symbol, keyframes to each four frames etc), new layer on top of all the others and lifted the button in the layer. I have a keyframe in my first frame and I have assigned the action to the object itself (at some moment was trying to add a action to a frame ) and I have a keyframe in the end with the exact same action added. Here is the code:

on (release) {
getURL ("http://www.google.com/","_blank");
}

The syntax checker doesnt find any errors and it seems to be fine, it just wont take me to google.com when I click on the banner. I even tried adding motion tween to the button and finally I have ran out of ideas.

Imported the grass as a bitmap tho, it did put a lot of strain on my CPU and now it seems a little less cycle-hungry, it still hits the CPU usage to 50% at the end of each animation. It has also solved my glyph problems, I guess my comp or flash itself was not able to pump out enough resources to render it properly (come to think about it there were about 1000 leaves )

here is the banner itself:
ImageShack - Hosting :: bannerfinaltj8.swf

Any advice is welcome.

EDIT: argh, was looking at the banner a little and while it stopped because of CPU strain a little hand appeared and when I clicked it took me to google.com.

[2Dfruit]

I don't know what your account balance is, but fireworks has excellent direct copy/paste with fireworks (same company)

great vector tools. You could use it as a side tool avoid all the trouble.

[Herr Kurm]

ImageShack - Hosting :: bannerfinalop0.swf

Finally got it sorted. I´d love to swear a bit at macromedia developers but I´d probably get banned for extensive foul languge not appropriate for even this forum. The problem was that those cunts did not understand that if you add no fill and no stroke to a object it doesn´t magically disappear, the object must stay there and be editable/selectable/manipulatable like in Illustrator. Selecting solid fill and cranking the alpha channel down to 0 did the trick and got the invisible overlay button working. I sincerely hope that with the coming of CS3 this crap will be fixed.

Pay attention to the website (my firstborn) it links to - I´m going to brake a few noses and arms to get it perfectly along the grid and my own renders of graphics swapped to that utter messed up shit that the chap "coding" it placed there. Programmers, sigh...