Flash: Using 3D and Flash
If you read my category description you’ll note this area is for tips from one novice to another - so please don’t berate me if this stuff seems obvious to you.
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If you work in Flash, or perhaps even traditional animation, learning at least the basics of 3D may allow you to power up your work. As a simple example I was thinking of how I might create a cool Flash title screen for my Primal Soup short last semester. I tried a quick test project like this …
The basic idea worked but it was boring and I decided to draw the text in perspective. Well, I found drawing all those letters in perspective a bit tedious and so I fired up my student version of 3DS Max, used the Text object to quickly add my title, set the angle I wanted and render it. I used the “Render Hidden Outlines” option which gave me simple ‘coloring book’ style output. I then brought this into Flash, traced the outlines on a new layer, created my masked areas and colored. Here is the result …
You can take another small step and learn to use features like Ink N’ Paint to render out simple 3D cartoon layouts and even special effects - like water squirting- and bring those into Flash as image layers or video. We are doing that in our current Studio Production project; I’ll post some of those renders later this week so you can see how well they work. Another plus is how simple it is to render a new camera view if you decide you need it. Instead of redrawing everything from the new angle you move the camera and render. We also found 3D useful to help visualize a shot; I had to draw the storyboards but couldn’t quite get the angle right. One of the other students dragged out some simple objects and rendered from the angle they wanted and it immediately conveyed to me what she wanted.
If you want to look at the FLA file for the title scene here it is;
Zip File (281kb)
So, don’t write-off 3D even if you are a “2D guy.” Learning even some basic features may be useful in your work.