Ive been banging my head against a brick wall for the past hour trying to work out why Flash CS4 was messing up the designers 3d animation when i copied it from his flash document to my much tidier and organised flash document. I never use Paste in Center, infact its hardwired in my head to Paste in Place (Ctrl + Shift + V).
The problem:
The designer has put together a motion test in Flash CS4, inside a particular movieclip of interest to me he has lots of 3d rotation tweens. I needed that movieclip for my build so i thought it should be as easy as selecting it, copying it (Ctrl + C) and then pasting it into my document where i could tidy up the symbol names, layer names and so on inside my file.
As i said previously i always use Paste in Place, but it turns out that once i had pasted it into my document the 3d animation the designer had done looked completley different. Everything had moved (been wrongly translated). I tried various things to fix the problem, i made sure the 3d vanishing point and perspective were the same, then i went through each item on the timeline in my document to make sure the 3d center point was the same and so on. Turns out everything was the same. (on a side note, why is it that i have to select a 3d object to change these settings? why not just be a setting in the Document Properties?)
It seems that when you paste in place, Flash simply messes up the 3d calculations when it tries to replicate the animation in your new document, not sure why, could be numerous things, which i dont currently have the time to investigate further.
The Solution:
Quite a simple solution, don’t copy an instance of a symbol from one document to the other otherwise it will not be the same as it was. Instead open up the libraries of both documents and copy the actual symbol into the other documents library and then drag it onto the stage and position it manually yourself. This doesn’t mangle the 3d properties of any of the instances on stage.
I thought i would post it here incase anybody else find themselves banging their head against a brick wall with the same issue.