Easier Flash animating?
 

I have Flash MX and I can't for the life of me figure out how to make simple sprite flashes, which is all I really like to do. It makes everything so needlessly difficult.

Is there an easier program, or easier version of flash? I'm trying Swish now but it seems almost too basic to handle more vector based stuff as well as sprite animations.

I'd prefer it to be reasonably cheap, obviously, but I guess it doesn't matte in the long run as long as I can use it, since I'm in college and they give us stuff anyway.

Moving to Arts and Crafts.

SWiSHmax (link to the site for those playing at home) can actually be a very powerful program, once you get the hang of it. Works just as well as anything that's pre-Flash 8. The only thing that's really held it back is the lack of audio sync. >_>

What do you mean by Audio sync? That sounds important.

If you're familiar with Flash, you'll know that it can stream sound. Particularly handy for long tracks, like songs for music videos and long dialogue lines, because they usually don't get out of syncronization.

As far as I know, SWiSHmax doesn't do streaming. It's all event-based, so once the sound gets the signal to play, it'll play regardless of how the animation is playing. This is usually okay for short (5 second) parts of dialogue and music loops, but if you've got a long track playing and it needs to fit to certain parts of the animation, you're pretty much out of luck.

This may have changed in the latest version. I just haven't seen it listed in the history update list. o_O

EDIT: Gweeh, forgot to mention. There's no direct way of importing video into SWiSHmax. I've heard you can use SWiSHvideo to do it somehow, but the only work around I've noticed is importing a video into Adobe ImageReady CS2, exporting as SWF, and importing that into SWiSHmax.

If you wanna do Flash, I'd look into the actual Flash. @_@

I've tried to make some sprite animations in Swish. The problem is that when you paste a sprite into Swish, you have that little white box around it. In photoshop, you just use your magic eraser. I have no idea how to get rid of that in Swish. That and the process of making a walking sprite (alternating between 3 different sprites while having it move across the stage) seems very daunting.

Click on the sprite, and go to your "Shapes" tab.

http://img496.imageshack.us/img496/4...xtrans14tv.png

That'll bring up a dialogue box, similar to the one below. Check the "Transparency" tab, and select the background color.

http://img242.imageshack.us/img242/4...trans2b3le.png

Now you have transparency! Make sure you don't just go with white, as there are sometimes sprites with white. Choose a flat bright color straight out of the pallete, like Magenta, Cyan, or Green.

Just on that. Alternatively to using the Transparency checkbox in SWiSHmax, you can put the sprites through Photoshop, remove the background, and save as a transparent 24-bit PNG. Sprites should be saved as PNG when animating, otherwise you could end up with one hell of a filesize on the animation.

Not if you group the three sprites together as a... well, a sprite. Select the sequentual sprites, right-click, and go down to "Group" > "Group as Sprite".

http://img247.imageshack.us/img247/5...sprite17kr.png

Then, all you have to do is go in and animate the sprite as if it was a GIF, or something. "Place, Remove" for all sprites except the final, where it's "Place, Place" to avoid a blank frame.

http://img463.imageshack.us/img463/3...prite2b3dn.png

Continued in next post due to image limit...

There is another way which involves having the sprites as actual separate images, but it requires much more work. Because I'm a terrible explainer when it comes to these things, I'll give the command run through first.

Timeline:
"Move" > X Position: Move (Left/Right) by (number of pixels); "Remove" command directly after. Next sprite, Place > Jump to Left/Right by (number of pixels moved before plus distance covered in one frame), copy previous move and remove, repeat on all sprites in sequence (changing the move for place frame from adding the distance covered in one frame, to adding the distance in two frames).

http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/2...maxmove8qc.png

It helps if you move going by "so many pixels" per frame, depending on the size of the sprite. So, if you've got a walking sequence with 5-frame length "Move" commands, with sprites that have been sized at 400%, then a distance of 8 pixels per frames would be what you go by (moving two blocks per frame), making the move distance "40". The first Place jump should be "48", while all following Place jumps become "56".

http://img290.imageshack.us/img290/1...axmove27tp.png

A terrible explanation, but it's the best I can give.

Wow Chicago. That's really helpful. If I could rep you, I would because this is one of the best posts I've seen on this forum (... mods *hint* *hint*).

Thanks Chicago. :)

Wow, this stuff is so much better than Flash it's barely funny. Flash REALLY needs to improve. I think they purposely make it difficult to try and have a faux-professional feel to it, when if you look at most of it's output(esp. Newgrounds) you'll know it really isn't.