The idea of creating SWF animations using an illustration package doesn't seem so odd when you think about the genesis of Flash. Flash's roots go back to a drawing package called SmartSketch, which won a MacUser Magazine MacEddy Award in 1995. The product was positioned for people who found the complex Bezier curves and handles in Illustrator and FreeHand hard to grasp. (Ironically, Flash 5 added Bezier handles and handle points.) FutureSplash soon integrated the SmartSketch technology into FutureSplash Animator, which earned accolades of its own: In its January 1997 FutureSplash review, MacUser wrote, "because its vector-based animated elements download far more efficiently than the bitmap-based animations of competing technologies, FutureSplash Animator may prove to be the most important graphics product yet for Web-page designers."
By August 1997, Macromedia had taken over FutureSplash and turned it into Macromedia Flash. With the addition of sound Flash animations began to pop up all over the Web. In 1997 Macromedia also released an update for FreeHand 7 that added the ability to turn FreeHand documents into Flash movies. These converted Flash movies weren't as small as documents created in Flash (Macromedia has by now solved that problem), but the concept was very important: Instead of working with Flash's more primitive drawing tools, designers could use more-sophisticated features such as text on a curve to create animations.
Another important development was Macromedia's decision to make SWF an open format. This allowed Adobe to add SWF output to Illustrator, as well as to create its SWF-compatible Adobe LiveMotion animation package.
Spiraling Text
My favorite example of using FreeHand or Illustrator to create SWF movies is to create the spiraling text example shown here.
(SWF animation not available in printer-friendly format)
I like showing this example because although Flash has excellent animation tools, it would be incredibly time consuming to do this completely in Flash. Fortunately it is rather easy to create it in Freehand or Illustrator.
Start by creating a spiral using FreeHand's spiral tool. (Illustrator users can use Illustrator's spiral.) If you draw the spiral from the center outward, as we did, you will need to choose Modify>Alter Path>Reverse Direction so that the text moves from the outside of the spiral to the inside. (Illustrator users can reverse the direction of the path by clicking on the center of the path to make it the end point.)

Draw your spiral in FreeHand or Illustrator.

Create progressively smaller text by using scale tool and repeating the transformation.

Load your shrinking text into one box by selecting all text boxes, copying the text, creating a new text box, and choosing Edit>Paste.

Attach the text to the spiral using Text>Attach to Path (in FreeHand).

Create your sequence animation by releasing the objects to layers. FreeHand gives you four different ways to release objects.
Choose File>Export to convert the file into the SWF format. The SWF options let you control the compression, frame rate, security, and other aspects of the Flash animation. When the Animation is set to Layers, each of the Layers in the document becomes a keyframe in the Flash movie. When the animation is set for Pages, you can use FreeHand's multiple pages as keyframes. This option is useful if you want to use FreeHand to comp an entire Flash Web site, but that's a different column. (Sadly, page-based animation is one of the features sorely missing from Illustrator's SWF options.)

FreeHand gives you numerous options when exporting your animation to the SWF format.
Creating SWF animations in FreeHand and Illustrator is as simple as that, and the possibilities could keep you busy -- and entertained -- for a very long time. Better yet, either of these illustration packages gives you an easy way to create some animations that would push Flash well past its limits.
0 comments:
Post a Comment