in flash you don't always have to create your artwork directly in the program
you can actually create it with outside program such as photo shop and illustrator
now fair warning
flash is a VECTOR program
as with all animation
it's not meant to be photo real
and so it tends to prefer adobe illustrator files which creates vector
files
rather than photoshop but that doesn't mean that you can't import photoshop
but just be aware that bitmap photos
or raster photos
have a larger file size and they could bog down your project
and
it's just not something that it's gonna show up
beautiful perfect
crystal-clear quality in your
in your flash program
so I'm going to show you how to create
or import illustrator and photo shop files
let's start with illustrator
will go to file
import
and you can either choose to import directly to the stage if your gonna work on it right
now or you can import to the library
I always like to import to the library because I don't like it to interfere
with what whatever I might have happening on my stage
so I'll choose import to library
and I'll choose my art supplies dot eight-i
and I can go ahead and hold the control key on my keyboard and click this
little toggle
and that's gonna give me this little shortcut menu to collapse all
and now this is showing up as all the different art supplies now
their already named
and they're showing up as individual item's and that's because when I put this
in illustrator
I made sure that they were in all all on their own separate layers
and they all had specific names
so make sure that your illustrator and your photoshop file is
is as organized as you can possibly make it so it's a lot easier when you import
into flash
now there's a lot of different options that you have for both importing illustrator
and photo shop files
and it's not going to hurt if you open up a new document and just keep
trying to import the same file over and over again to see
what settings do what things so for instance
let's say I wanted to change this to key frames
let's see what happens when I hit
okay
it's going to import that file and now all of a sudden I have this ai file
but it's actually a movie clip
so I'll go ahead and move it up here
and we'll zoom out to see what's happening with this
and as with all movie clips I can double click inside
and see what happened
and it looks like
it actually has
each of the paint supplies or art supplies
on a frame by frame animation so it did in fact
pull it in as key frames
now if you didn't want to have that happen you could delete
this movie clip
or you can also drag this
to the library and convert it to whatever type of symbol you want and give it a name
but they're easier ways to do this
so I'm gonna go ahead and delete that movie clip
and re-import
and
choose a different setting
so let's try one more experiment
right-click and do collapse all
and from here I'll do flash layers
so let's see what happens when I do that
so now I have a graphic symbol
and I can pull it on there
and again with all symbols
you can double click to see what's happening inside and it doesn't look
like I have flash layers it's just my regular layer one and then I have
this graphic symbol so let's double click
and now all of a sudden I can see within that internal timeline for that
graphic symbol
all of the different supplies are on their own layer
and they took the same name that I gave um in the layers in illustrator
so that's pretty cool
but I don't think I like that one either
so I'll go ahead and delete that and this is the one that I use most often where I just
convert everything that comes into a movie clip
so I'll do fit in window
and
import
to library
choose it again
now I don't want to import all of these
because that'll take a long time so let's just say I want
the spray paint
and the paint pallet and the paint tubes
so you can important um as a bitmap again its gonna be pretty pixelated because
flash doesn't like bitmap
files
so instead I'm gonna create this as a movie clip
and give it a name so this one will do mc spray paint
and then I'll click on the paint pallet
mc pallet
and i'm not sure if you really call these tubes I call um tubes so
mc tubes alright
so it's not gonna bring any of the other stuff in
let's click okay
and all of a sudden we have this graphic symbol and it only has the three paint supplies
in it so if I double click inside you can see that their their own layer
but now if I click in this folder
each of my symbols has their own folder
and now I can drag um into my project
one-by-one
so let's go ahead and leave that there
and well do let's do the paint tubes
up here
and I can mess with all this stuff make it smaller
and there we go
so those look really good because they are in fact vector
graphics
and that's what flash likes
so let's see what happens when we try to import a flash or a photo shop file which is
bitmap or raster graphics
so I'll go to file
and import
to library
and I'll choose this art variety dot p_s_ d
and let's go ahead and look at what this looks like in photoshop
I have a background that I was just using to see what it would look like on a
dark background
but I've turned off both of those layers because I don't need the white one
and I don't need the dark one
I want to be able to decide what that should look like in flash
and then I have the paint splatter tattoo artists and graffiti pictures
but I've also added a border to each one
and a drop shadow now it's important to note that within
side flash
you can take those photos and add strokes and you can add drop shadows
so you don't necessarily have to do um in the photo shop program but I just wanted to
show you a feature
and it's kind of a weird feature and I've never used it but at least I'll show you
this feature that can happen
if you add styles to layers in photo shop
before you import
so now when I come back to the import dialogue box
it's going to tell me all the layers that's were in that photo shop file and I can convert
um to flash layer's or key frames
and by checking each one I can choose what I want so for the graffiti
artists and tattoo and paint
there all gonna come in as
bitmap images
or I can have um come in as a movie clip layer so let's say for the paint splatter
I want to call this
mc paint
splatter and
let me give you a couple of
let's see for the tattoo artists we'll do bitmap image with editable layer styles
it's automatically going to be a movie clip so I'll call this mc tattoo
and for the graffiti artist were going to change this compression to lost less so
that means it's not really gonna compress it's not gonna lose any data when
it compresses
so if I do calculate bitmap size
it's gonna be a hundred and twenty three k
when if it was LOSSE it would actually be fourteen point eight k
so this would be great for load times for my project and you have to balance
quality
with low time
so I'll change this back to lost less so you can see the quality of that
and
I think all of our experiments for those three layers are good so let's see what
it looks like
so it's gonna pull it in and again it's gonna give us a graphic symbol that has all
three and then each of them has their own
folder that they can be in
so let's pull this graffiti image in
now that image your gonna see it is a little bit pixilated because again flash is
not
you know it's not meant for again
raster or a bitmap graphics
but it is pretty good and it brought in my
stroke and it brought in my drop shadow
so let's see what happened with the tattoo artist
this one
LOSSE so it did have compression so it is a smaller file size
and if I double click inside of it you can see that
it separated the drop shadow from the images cell
so that we can still edit that drop shadow or you can get rid of it
if you didn't want that drop shadow on your picture
now for the paint splatter um
I can't remember what settings I already forgot what settings we did for that one
oh it was just gonna be a movie clip
so now all of these are created as movie clips and you didn't have to take that extra
time in step
so when it comes to importing graphics just play around with a couple of
settings in a project you don't care about
and also be aware that if you go into the program preferences
you should be able to go to the photo shop file importer and ai file importer
and this is where you can set the setting so that you don't
if you have a certain way you do things and your doing it all the time
hopefully this will save you time so your not always having to click on settings
every time you import something