FlashGuru Blog

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.

A good Flash Designer will put alot of effort into a preloader, knowing that it may be viewed for sometime while the site loads in the background. Its eye candy to keep the viewer occupied during the times when content or data is being loaded in. Big Spaceship have put together a site to showcase and archive preloaders from websites past and present. Checkout the preloader museum and waste a bit of time watching  loaders loading nothing, a collection of less than ordinary, pretty looking preloaders from websites old and new. Somewhat of a homage to the preloader. You can submit your own preloaders to pretty loaded aswell.

Today Adobe have released a beta version of Flash Player 10 to the masses. Its available to download now on Adobe Labs, there you will find various demos that showcase some of the new features in the player.

The latest player features some of the most requested features since the release of the last version of the Flash Player:

Bi-Directional Text Support - People have been asking for this for years.

3d Effects - Move DisplayObjects around in 3d space with Actionscript.

Dynamic sound generation - Andre Michelle, eat your heart out.

FileReference runtime access to files without sending the file to the server first.

Typed Arrays - AKA Vectors (An array that contains only data of the same type).

GPU Blitting/Compositing - Faster rendering old and new Flash Movies.

Custom Filters - Get more info about Adobe Pixel Blender, a new programming language that allows you to create your own super fast filters by manipulating pixels.

I am very, very excited about this release primarily because its now easy to create truly localized worldwide websites in Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew and all the other languages that have been tricky business in the past. I dont think it is as ground-breaking as Flash Player 9 which was a huge leap forward, but there are still some pretty hefty game-changing features in this one. I have on concern already and that is that i am worried that the 3d Effects are going to be misused/overused now its so easy and we will have another Skip Intro era.