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Archive for the 'Flash' Category

Comic Books for the Masses?

Posted in Art and Animation, Flash, Photoshop on June 27th, 2008 by burtabreu

I like to draw and have often thought of creating a comic book. My character skills are still a bit underdeveloped and getting a consistent result from frame to frame takes a lot of time. Using Flash as a way to build reusable characters to pose and render out as static comics (or with some animation like moving clouds, exploding panels etc) has been on my mind. I imagine the standard library building techniques would be great for this and once built, could speed up the process - what do you think?

Ryan Simmons at CartoonSolutions, who I interviewed last year, has created a series of Comic Book Products. These include comic book page templates, action sounds, word and thought balloons. All of these can be used with the background, prop and character packs.

All the products are pretty inexpensive so I decided to put together a quick page. Here is what I did in about one hour (click to see a larger version) …

Cool Flash Component - Particulator

Posted in Art and Animation, Flash on June 11th, 2008 by burtabreu

I’m playing with a new Flash component by the folks at

FlashExtension.NET.

It’s called the Particulator and it offers users an easy way to add some cool particle effects to their projects. You can adjust many parameters and object properties using sliders. Smoke, fire, sparks - it’s great to be able to do this right in Flash. Trial version available. Cool.

Click Image for More Info …

Cartoon Car - Free Flash File

Posted in Art and Animation, Flash on March 1st, 2007 by burtabreu

In an effort to continue to improve my Flash skills I worked on this toon car tonight. I figured I’d offer it to anyone who may find it useful in their own animations or to study. Since I am a student I would of course welcome critiques on anything from the animation, to the design or even the logical breakdown of the component symbols.

Download the FLA

I noticed the perspective was wonky so I made a couple quick 3D renderings with simple shapes to trace. I think winding it up the road in Flash would require too many views. Here are some of the renderings in case anyone finds the idea worthwhile -even a minimal 3D knowledge and placing simple shapes could be helpful for visualization I think.

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Flash: Using 3D and Flash

Posted in Flash on February 20th, 2007 by burtabreu

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.

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 … Read more »