shapes dissappear when importing Anime .swfs into Flash

[luftbuefel]

Sometimes when I import the .swfs generated by Anime Studio bits of shapes disappear, most often the fills. For example a character's arm fill will dissappear leaving only the outlines. This usually occurrs to only part of the entire frames. There is no real consistency as to why it occurs, so it may be a corruption in the file itself. As the .swfs are created in Anime Studio they look fine, the problem only occurs when they are imported into Flash.

Has anyone else run into this problem? Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I might fix the problem. Thanks for your help.

[jahnocli]

Yes. I've come across this A LOT. The swf file looks fine, until you try to import it into Flash, then half the fills go missing. I deal with this in three ways:

1) If it has complicated fills, BUT I KNOW IT ISN'T GOING TO BE DEFORMED BY BONES etc., I save that part of the image as a png file. For example, I had some complicated bracelets on a character recently, but I knew they weren't going to be "animated", so I used this technique.

2) Separate lines from fills, and keep everything as simple as possible. Don't try to import patchwork fills -- stack 'em up instead. (Look out for node points piled on top of each other; difficult to see, but can mess up your fills if you don't get rid of them).

3) Separate animations into layers, and export the minimum possible so you can piece it together again in Flash.

Hope this helps.

[cribble]

Use layer translation tools rather than using the actual point translation tool. This keeps the shape optimized and stops it from exporting all funny and what-not.

Also, AS doesn't like exporting long animation sequences to SWF. If you have done a long sequence, stagger export it ex: 1-50 frames, then 51-100 frames.

[Squeakydave]

Flash is a tricky chap and actually pretty limited.

I think it minces the fills if you have points too close together or that are caused to overlap through animation. Flash does not seem to work very well at sub pixel level so i think it averages out point positions on import that can cause problems if you have points close together.

There are a few things you can do to help though.
1. design characters with as few points as possible. I have found this to be the best solution. If you have a complex character try deleting any extra points around any areas where the points may be animated into each other.

2. Exporting at 200%(or more) and scaling down in Flash itself. That sometimes helps.

3. Stacking fills.
If , for example, you have done a t-shirt with a zig-zag line on the chest. (I did do such a thing and lost fills) Normally the zig-zag would be one fill and the rest of the t-shirt another. Try first filling the whole of the t-shirt and then placing the zig-zag fill on top of it. It worked fo me!

Hope this helps!

[luftbuefel]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. For my purposes I have exported in chunks and where necessary I just copied and pasted the fills into each frame within Flash. Luckliy, the fill problem only occurs on some frames on a few files.