Flash :: Photograph Masking Techniques

Help With Masking Techniques
I need help with masking? I read the basic tutorials in Flash 5 and Flash MX (i have both) and just dont understand it too much. I see masking techniques used in every good flash file but dont understand it too much. I just want to be able to make a good transition between movie clips and/or images. Can anyone point me in the right direction or hook me up with a basic fla file that explains this to me (one that i can take apart and play around with).

Thank you, your help is appreciated

~Jeff

Masking Techniques
Greetings Ladies and Gents,

I've been in flash for quite some time but I started off on more of the development side. Now Im giving in to my " design fantansies" so Im approaching flash from a different angle. Im curious if anyone could share with me their masking techniques with more complex objects, such as curves, angles, etc. If you don't know what I mean here's a visual. This was posted here a while ago, the guy is amazing.

http://www.andreaswannerstedt.se/session/

Currently, I cut apart the image or vector as much as possible and mask them on different layers. I know that having too many masks isn't the greatest for file optimization. So Im curious if anyone else has a better way or could speculate what the best practice for this is.

As always, any replys will be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Christoph'

Unscrolling A Photograph
Does any one know how to "unscroll" a photograph (or anything else) from the middle on outwards like this website?

http://www.directiondesign.nl/flash.html

I think it must be simple, but I'm just not getting it right now. Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks.

Photograph Problem
Alright, I've gone through posting since last september looking for an answer. I've tried many prior recommendations, nothing has worked. Here' s my dilemma:

When importing a n rgb photo from photoshop (specs: 760x507 pixels, color, saved as .jpg at 240 ppi) in my library, my image is softening, loosing color, lightening and loosing it's original intense contrast. hmm, i know a lot of people have experienced this problem and I'm hoping the solution is simple. I've tried numerous prior solutions written about on this forum none to any avail: 1) i have right clicked the image in flash library hoping to deselect "allow smoothing" under properties, it was already deselected. 2) i have resaved my photoshop image at 72 ppi, because someone had mentioned that flash can't process truly photos above 72. Still crappy. 3) i've saved the image as a .png, 'n' still soft and low contrasty when in flash

Any ideas simple or complex would be much appreciated. Thanks for everyone's time, ben

Photograph Quality Problems
Hello,

I'm having problems with the quality of my photos in my Flash introduction.

It seems that once I've resized them in photoshop and drop them into the application, they get very fuzzy.

I'm kind`of a Flash dabbler...not a real seasoned pro...

Also any advice for keeping fonts clean?

Thanks.

Doug D

Question About Reflection Of A Photograph
Hello...I am thinking this must be pretty easy. I have a photograph that I want to have a reflection of it below the photograph, but I want the reflection part to look like it's fading...like a linear fade from top to bottom...70% alpha to 0% alpha. Is this possible in flash....version MX.

Ripple The Water In Photograph
I have posted this to a few forums, so you may be seeing it again...

I have a picture of a cabin on a lake, I want to use this as the flash intro for a website. I would like a mist to cover the picture and then float away, and the water in the lake to "shimmer" or make it look as if it is "moving"...kind of like you were looking at a video clip, not a static picture.

Is this something I would do in any of the creative suite programs? or studio 8 programs? or is it something completely different.

The programs I have are, creative suite 2 and studio 8 (flash etc) oh, I am on a Mac so the "squirzl" program doesn't work.

Thanks!

Need To Upload Photograph Into Flash
Well i am pretty new to flash but i need help i need to make a school project where i need to uplaod photograph into my flash and put it on my cartoons face.I know very well XML,ASP and SQL server

Can I Convert A .jpg Photograph To Flash Grapchics?
What I am saying is I want to convert a .jpg photograph of mine into Flash vector graphics which don't blur when you zoom in.

Here's an exmaple picture:
http://images.deviantart.com/large/i...ctorstryke.jpg

im sure its not drawn in flash, maybe its converted in some way

can i do it with flash?

Preserving Photograph Color Profiles
When I pass my photographs into a Flash holder using XML it seems that the image files loose their color profile information. Does anyone know how to prevent this? I have saved the images out of photoshop through Image Ready with an sRGB profile as jpg's essuring that the icc color profiles were imbedded in the file.

Thanks,
Alex

AS For Thumbnail To Load Big Size Photograph On Click
Hello,
I have a webpage with about 6 thumbnails. I would like flash to upload full size photographs, when viewer clicks on those thumbnails. Could anyone tell me, how is it done?
First of all, where are those photographs stored. Are they on the same server as my website? And should they be just simple jpegs on its own or should they be embeded on independent page.html?
And finally, what is the AS for this?

Would it be something like this?
Let's say I would put jpeg on the same server as mysite and name it photo1.jpeg

on(release){
getURL("

Quick Way To Make Mask From Photograph Of A Face?
I am trying to integrate crazytalk talking heads with flash mx. I can create a flash talking head fine, but now I want to put the head on a body that I will animate in flash. To do this, I need to create a mask over the frames created from the crazytalk avi export. See here:

http://www.reallusion.com/crazytalk/ct_flash_tut.asp

I have not really used masks much, and I have being working with both flash mx and paintshop pro (3.0) to try and create mask from the original photograph that was used to create the talking head. I just cannot seem to figure it out. Yes, I do realize the lasso tool works, but it seems imprecise. There must be a way to simply turn a photo into a mask, no?

thanks.

A Few Techniques ..
Im in need of a few tutorials which cover effects shown in this website : http://hostrocket.com/

Im not talking about the "activate launch sequence" intro - Just the animation used on the header.
Any help would be appreciated .

btw im 100% Flash Noob.

New Techniques?
Since Flash 8 released I've seen a lot of new techniques being used, especially the use of Flash in streaming video, full screen flash backgrounds, etc.

What other new techniques have been introduced with Flash 8?

Techniques.
I have been wondering for a while. How do I have a value never "hard coded" Like with mouse position, if i set _xmouse = xmos, then i use xmos inside a loop, i want it to always be the CURRENT xmos, does this question make sense?

Publishing Techniques ?
Hi people !!

Got an easy question for you !!

I've designed a Flash website to the size of 1000 x 595 pixcels so it fit's perfectly into a Webbrouser with a screen resolution of 1024x786.

What I'm not sure on is if a person viewing my site with a screen resolution set to 1152x864 or 1280x1024 etc .... will see my Flash movie in the center of their screen and not in the top corner !??

Any way of publishing it to fit the center of any window without scaling up the Fla ??

Animation Techniques
i have an irregular shape (a jigsaw piece), which i am going to use as a button on a website and i want it to rotate smoothly on mouseover.

i was wondering if any one has any suggestions on the best way to animate the rotation? ie. do you think the only way to do it would be frame by frame?

i've not really done much animation at all in flash- been mostly using it for creating images!

thanks,

carly

Datagrid Techniques
I'm new to using datagrids, and i'm doing ok with the basics - ie, taking some XML, grabbing what I want and throwing it in, while styling the columns to get it to look how i want.

However, I'm not sure of the best way to do something, so here i am. Here is what I'd like to do:

I'm displaying a list of students within a class. There could be N number of classes in this grid. So, by default, i'd like just the class names to display. When a class is clicked on, the names display below. When the class is clicked on again the student names would dissappar...etc.

So basically, a list of classes, with a nested list of students that can be displayed or hidden based on how the user interacts with it.

What would the best way to go about doing this?

Take which class is clicked on and just fill in that row with all the students?

Is there a way to nest a dataGrid within that row?

any tips/advice would be greatly appreciated! thanks in advance!

-tyler

Scrolling Techniques
Hi flashkitties :P

I got a list of things displayed on this page, but i dont wanna use a normal scrollbar for it

Is it possible to , when a user mouse over the upper part of the page means scroll up

when the user mouse lower the lower part of the pages it means scroll down?

Also, can i do it with clicks?

Thank you

Animation Techniques
Hello all

Can anyone point me in the direction of a good tutorial for animating characters. IE trying to get them to walk and move in a (reasonably) realistic but cartoony way. At the moment Im trying to get a bull to walk across the screen and to be honest it just looks plain bull s**t!

Thanks in advance!

Best Compression Techniques, Jpg Vs Gif
Hi guys,

It's been a while since I dabbled with Flash.

after a long battle to try and get flash on the site (www.marksandspencer.com) the management has allowed it.

I'd like to have a play around with some images at home, though don't know the best way to get the best quality of image, with best file sizes, uhmmmm.

The images are prodominantly lifestyle photography with some text elements.

any help with this would be much apprieciated,

many thanks

Help With Fade Techniques...
Hi, I wouldnt say I'm new to flash but i am by no means an expert.
I'm a graphic/web designer and ive been asked to create a bit of flash for a website, they want the flash to work like this...

http://www.bentleymotors.com/Corpora...spx?infid=1028

So when you click on the relevant colour the colour fades into the new one. Doing a standard fade from one colour to the next is easy, but what i dont know how to do is to be able to fade from whatever colour is selected to whatever colour is selected next using a button.

Oh and i'm a bit of a novice when it comes to action scripting, which is what i think ill need for this :-S

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Many Thanks

Nikky

Optimization Techniques
Hi!

I´m doing a research on RIA´s optimization techniques and I plan to implement such in my app´s next version as its getting bigger and bigger so it became a necessity to optimize it.

Currently, I´m using shared fonts, shared symbols and shared classes (the so called "dll" swf) that are all loaded once in the application lifetime, avoiding the download redundancy and optimizing the size of the subsequent swfs. However, my application is still not fast as I would like it to be, the main reason is obvious, it uses too many classes (and v2 framework adds a great deal to the class inventory). The second reason is becouse of the nature of my app: Its an online picture album. The images are stored in 1MP at the server and each time the client requests the image, its converted (scaled down) at runtime using GD. It´s very flexible as I can make many different size images without worring about saving them, however, and I would like the oppinion of more experienced web developers, I think it would bring me problems when my site gets a very high trafic AND it is slower than if I would just load the image without pre-processing it (already saved in the disk. Currently, only the 1MP "source" image is stored, the other "flavors" are generated at runtime using GD).

Also, I´ve not implemented controls such as to prevent the client to redownload the picture if it is already downloaded - how could I do that? Something that came into my mind is to use SharedObjects to cache data and some logic to implement such thing.

You can view a beta of the app here: http://www.chapeco-online.com.br/website/

Some of the client and server code has been based on Sephiroth´s ImageGallery3 (www.sephiroth.it).

Any suggestions would be very much appreaciated!

Thanks,

- Marcelo.

Optimization Techniques
I've been doing work for intranets forever, now I'm doing some stuff for the web, what are the best techniques to shrink my movie size?

Preloading Techniques
lets say my movie's size consists mainly of 2 movie clips, and the rest of the mc's are tiny. what would be the best way to preload, so that wait up front is minimal, but the content is properly loaded?

should I use a preloader?

should I export the big MC's on the first frame? (is that an MX option only?)

if I use a combination of the two, should I only preload the movie like so: totalBytes to preload = size - big MC size?

preloading...

Optimization Techniques
Hi there,

I'm looking for some general pointers in regards to speed optimization techniques; by this I mean producing a swf file that runs essentially as smoothly published on a website as it does simply previewing. I find the motion tends to be fairly chunky, particularly motion tweening and such. I'm curious what things I should keep in mind to avoid this?

-Sean

Optimization Techniques...
Hey guys... it's me again... I think this is the last question I have for a while.

What techniques can be taken to optimize a site?... I want it to be efficent on size. I have provided a link to a current project as an example... I'm not looking for critique of the site. It just serves as an example for you to see what I'm currently working with.

Example Project

How do the big name sites stay optimized (like 2advanced.com and liquidchrome.com)? By the looks and the amount of graphical content these sites should be huge.

How much is to much and what do I minimize?... This is primarily a Flash forum... You guys collectivelly are some of the most knowledgable people around concering this piece of software... So I appreciate your input and help.

-oasis-

Flash Techniques
im a n00b.
i would like to find out the techniques that all these sites use, to have so many movie clips...
for example 2advanced.com has a lot of movie clips, and i was wondering how were they correlated.
is it all about nested movie clips?

How To - Speed Techniques
I'm looking for tutorials or books on how to get all that speed out of flash.

Sites (rather, site makers) such as www.hi-res.net and egomedia are among the best examples I've seen.

Actionscript? Frame rates? or just smart usage of imagery and timing?

I've been all over on various sites like Flashkit (examples are all painfully slow) and I haven't found anything close.

Thanks

Which Cartooning Techniques Do You Use?
I was just wondering... How do you guys create your cartoon characters and what programs you guys use...
this is how i do mine

Illustrator:
first i make shapes (normal ones) combine them together
work with the points to make it into the shapes i want
Coloring:
duplicate the shape 3 times... first one is use for base color with no outlines.... second one is use for shadows with no outlines(cut out shadows from the original shape).... the third one is the shape with just the outline and transparent middle....
i stack them one on top of the other with base color first... shadow second and line on top.....

I was wondering if there are any other ways of doing it....
maybe an easier way...

Time-Outs And MM Techniques
I was wondering if anyone has tried to create a timeout in flash using actionscripting

I am working on a non-web MM project which will be on 24-7.

after say, 30 seconds of user inactivity, i want everything to return back to frame 1, the attract screen.

Is there a way to do this without sitting though a ton of blank frames?

Good Book Of Techniques?
Hi there,

As a newbie, I already moved forward the stage of the simple flash dev. and I started on doing some scripting. Moreover, I did some scripting and I believe I have a clear understanding of its behavior. Now, I want to get into a more serious scripting, I went to the bookstore and I found 239847289374 manuals about scripting.
Do you know which book would be a good "must to have" as for flash scripting techniques?
Of course I can browse this great site and find plenty of examples, but I like to build things by myself, sometimes you spend more time trying to guess what others do instead of doing it by yourself, don't you think?

Thank you guys, I really appreciate your help on this.

L

Poor Design Techniques
What are some poor design techniques that you flash and web designers see? I thought this would be a good topic for newbies to read and get some helpful tips.

MY BIG COMPLAINT

I emplore all fellow designers to stop using frames.

Be more creative and find a better way to do whatever it is you'd like to do. If you develop for money, when your customer goes to promote a special section and link to a specific page of their site, but the nav bar was in a frame it doesn't show up when you use a page specific link. Thus most likely the user will not be able to visit any other sections of that site. There are better ways, ask if you don't know.

Sorry, just had to get that out.

Bruce Almighty Techniques
Hi...

Can anyone tell me how they made the images of Jim Carey progressively fall apart on the Bruce Almighty website?

www.brucealmighty.com

The images are clear cut and set apart from the surface. Didn't think you could do this with jpegs as they don't support transparent backgrounds?

Flash Drawing Techniques
I have searched and searched for a book that gives some good techniques on drawing in Flash. Is there such a thing? I've got books on actionscript, basic Flash stuff, animation, etc... but I just can't seem to find one that JUST deals with drawing.

Does anyone have any suggestions or know of anything that deals with this topic? If so, please let me know.

Thanks

Great Website Techniques...
Hi,

I have been checking through some the webs latest and "greatest" flash websites and was amazed with what I found! There are two websites I was particularly fascinated by:

The first is at this website:

http://www.fantasy-interactive.com/#start

It uses flash video in a very sharp and crisp way. I have followed various tutorials on how to apply video to the web via flash but the quality of my Flv movies do not come out any where near as well as theirs!! Does anyone know of some worthwhile tutorials on high end video for the web via flash?

Ok, the second is at this website:

http://www.adobe.com/special/acrobat...herbetter.html

This site also uses high quality video but uses a neat little trick were there are several pictures of various people who look at your mouse when ever you move it around! Does anyone know how this is done?

Thanks for your time, if anyone can offer help such as tutorials etc it would be much appreciated.

Techniques

Best Techniques For Image Optimization
Hi, we're trying to complete our portfolio site that will have a fairly large amount of large high-quality bitmap images in certain sections.

I just want to make sure I totally understand the best image optimization techniques.

A) Is there any difference to setting the jpeg quality in the 'Publish Settings' dialog as opposed to the individual image properties dialog? (ie, if I set either to 80, would there be a difference)?

B) Is a simple fade in/out considered an animation and going to give us a big hit on quality vs. size? There is no scaling of the image.

C) If there is no movement, do I need to check 'Allow Smoothing' on each image?

D) If 'Allow Smoothing' is unchecked for each image (default), will changing the HTML quality settings (Medium, High, Best) have any affect on image quality or size?

E) In relation to C & D above, what does adding '_quality="Best";' action on first frame do differently?

F) The images are all saved as Photoshop files at 100% of size used in Flash. Would exporting to jpeg from Photoshop give us better quality vs. size than doing the jpeg optimization in Flash (ie, better jpeg compression algorithms)?

G) The files are currently .PSD files. Is saving them out as .PNGs before bringing into Flash going to really make any difference?

Thanks a lot. We need to be totally up on the proper pro techniques for this before getting too far along. It's a pretty big site.

If there are any other forums that would be recommended to find out these things, any link would also be greatly appreciated!

[F8] Tutorial Available To Show These Techniques?
I am looking for a tutorial that would be able to show me how to make a Flash interactive movie that would behave like the following:

http://www.weber.com/drtv/

Particularly I would like to learn how to create the effect of movement each time a section is clicked. For example, when the page/movie first loads, the larger main sections/buttons seem to move up the screen one after the other very quickly. If you click on "overview," the square on the right side of the screen shrinks down and then each thing is loaded separately and moves into place before stopping. It is a very nice, smooth effect and I want to know so bad what techniques they used to do it!

If anyone has any tutorials or instructional websites to point me to, it would be wonderful. Thank you!

[F8] PLEASE HELP -navigation Techniques And Buttons
I have a couple of questions about navigation and buttons. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. Thank you!

Navigation… I understand how to make a button work… simply make a button that links to another created page. I understand that. But what I don’t understand how to do, is have the section fade out to make a new section fade in. For example, when you are in a News section, how to have the News content fade out when you click the About section, and then have the About info fade in. Can someone please help? I use Flash CS3. Thanks!

Now, on a different page…

I want to have it so when I scroll over a button, the button lowers smoothly and becomes brighter. To my understanding, I need to create the animation of the button doing that, then set it so that when I go in the UP state of the button, it plays the animation. Is this so? And if so, how do I do that?

Scripted Motion Techniques
I am scripting a movie clip to be dynamically animated. For example using a coasting script like this:

ActionScript Code:
// Dummy Coasting
new_x = _root._xmouse;
// Target Movement
cur_x = _root.dummy._x;
speed = 12;
with (_root.dummy) {
_x=cur_x+(new_x-cur_x)/speed;
_y=_root._ymouse;
}
This gives the target dummy the 'delayed coast' motion. What I'm looking to do now is somewhat the opposite. I want a movieclip to coast, but start out slow and gradually get faster until it reaches the target position.

I think what I'm looking for is the equivalent of the 'ease' in a motion tween. Going from 100 to - 100. I've tried a few things of my own, but I'm not quite getting the effect I'm looking for.

Any ideas?

Loading Movie Techniques
Hi,

I'm familiar with the technique of loading movies into an empty MC and appreciated in the tutorial about creating the MC's with AC.

At the basic level I understand and have implement it. I'd like to use this technique an a more advance level to create my instructional project for my masters.

My main nav is an MC which will dynamically load into the main swf file, as well as a background and some text introducing the project. Right now i have an empty MC place on my main swf file acting as a container for each lesson.
Basically, depending up which lesson the user selects from the nav, a swf will load into the empty movie clip.

So it gets tricky when I start thinking about the components in each lesson. Each lesson will have the same components (other MC's for animation, video...) but different content. I'd like to also have empty MC's for each component of the lessons. I'm not sure where I would call the AS to load the components. Do I do this on the first frame of the main timeline for each lesson? Uhm ok I'll try.

So this works at the very basic where there isn't much in each lesson. Right now I am sticking with one level, but I guess I can load each lesson on a differrent level.

I was thinking about using one empty MC to load the lessons, but am I right to think that each time a lesson is replaced by another lesson, it will have have to be loaded all over if the user wants to return to it? How about placing 3 empty MCs on top of each other and then call each one for a different lesson? Maybe levels are a good idea then.

I know this is very conceptual, hey but thats were I am right now. I don't want to architect inefficiently and them come on posting to fix something that could be designed better.

Last thing about sound. If I load sound dynamically, I should be able to attach it to the timeline of an MC that contains an animation that I want to syn with the sound. Right. Ok, I have to try this. What is the AC I'd use to attach a sound called "drumbeat" to a frame.

Thank you in advance,

Lisa

Advanced Button Techniques Please Help 'useful'
hello

I want to make flash web site, but i want to make a 5 buttons, when click any button i want to play an effect as x effect in link below and after effect go to the linked page of it's button, how to make this button?

http://www.geocities.com/dutch_delusion/button.html

thx for all hard works!

Animation Techniques For Webpages
Hi there.

I am looking for inputs on animation techniques used for webpages. You see these kind of animations all over the place at www.templatemonster.com just to take an example. What i'm talking about are those nifty effects that run on the sites as they are loading content (usually right after the preloader has been run).

http://www.templatemonster.com/websi...tes/13619.html

http://www.templatemonster.com/flash...tes/13568.html

http://www.templatemonster.com/flash...tes/13515.html

And so forth.

Any help/hints are welcomed

Best regards

Bitmap Scaling Techniques
I have an app that makes use of many, externally loaded, graphics (gifs). These graphics are displayed throughout the application in different sizes and are animated with linear motion and "zooming" effects. My intention was to load all the graphics at the maximum needed size at 72 DPI, and then just size them down when needed, say, for a thumbnail. Since different bitmap instances can use the same BitmapData over and over again, I thought it would be inefficient to create both a full-size and a thumbnail image and load them both.

However, now that my program is up and running, I'm finding that when I resize these images, they look very bad. My resizing pseudo code looks something like this:

image
original_width, original_height
target_width, target_height

if(original_width > original_height) {
ratio = target_width / original_width
image.width = target_width
image.height = original_height * ratio
} else {
ratio = target_height / original_height
image.height = target_height
image.width = original_width * ratio
}

That's the general idea of my algorithm, anyway... I've since discovered that I could use scaleX and scaleY, or I could use a transformation matrix and the draw() method. I'm not sure if any of these would make a difference and I wanted to ask some people who have experience with this before I spend too much time experimenting.

Can someone recommend a good approach (or the best approach, if one exists) for accomplishing something like this?

Loading Techniques - Question
I was wondering about the various methods of loading a site. I was browsing the SOTW's and I came upon one that I remember seeing a long time ago. www.donshaw.com <--i noticed that the navigation at the top seems to load the content via a frame. Because what I want to accomplish in my site is interweaving flash and static pages into one design. Meaning, i want the navigation to be flash and stay on top (like on donshaw) but I want to be able to put flash or html in the content area. anyone have any ideas as to how I can accomplish this.

Also, how are movies aligned in the content area. Meaning, if its calling on different .swf's for the different parts of the movie, how do you get them to line up?

I'm new to flash, pardon my newby questions.

-boog

Techniques To A Cleaner Program
Hi, Im not an expert in flash, but I do on occasion help some buddies out if they want a menu or something on their webpage. When I am making these files, it seems like my organization and technique is sloppy. Any comments / suggestions / flames are welcome on how I could better organize this and other projects in the future.

~Thanks

Link to File:
http://www.geocities.com/matteoelbow/SR_Menu1.fla

Link to movie:
http://www.geocities.com/matteoelbow/SR_Menu1.swf

Advanced Transition Techniques
Hey Gang,

I just picked up transitions recently and I do it by loading an outside .swf file into my main flash movie. Is there and easier or different way or does anyone here have any tips or trick on transitioning they would like to share?

Respectfully,
Joneszy

Making The Different Techniques Work Together
Hey guys,

I was wondering about something. What is generally considered to be the best approach for building a nice, stable, clean, working website? You know, making ALL the elements work...

For instance. I want a full browser centered website, with a flash player check, I want to get ranked in google, so HTML needs to look good, I need a preloader that's more than just a horizontal bar, etcetera, etcetera. Basically all the ingredients you need to know to make a website really professional, stable and efficient!

Now, is there an up-to-date example somewhere that incorporates all this stuff in one clean file? Or a tutorial on this? Maybe an all-in-one example site that gives all the latest tricks and techniques to do these things, because I know that everyone here that builds flashsites for a living, must know how to do all this and make it work together, right? Maybe we can just have a debate on this?

So, what's the best way? And I dont mean different tutorials on different techniques. I mean an example that shows the best techniques for this approach and how to make it all work together...

Very interested in your answers!

Cheers!