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Flash Animation 5: Creating a Complex Character of Movable Parts

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7 of 10

Converting Bitmap Art Into Vector Art

Now here's a nifty little trick to convert your parts from rasterized images to clean vector drawings. Do this only if you want to convert your artwork to vector art. If you want to keep your original artwork, then skip to Step 8.

If your line art and color blocks are clean enough, you can actually tell Flash to convert them to vector art using a function called "Trace Bitmap". To do this, drag any one of your shapes--I'm going to use the head for an example--onto your canvas (you'll notice bitmaps/raster pieces are surrounded by a grey bounding box), and then go to Modify->Trace Bitmap. A dialogue will open to control various options.

Color Threshold controls how much Flash tries to adhere to the colors in your images. The lower the number, the more Flash will try to recognize different colors and shades. Minimum Area sets the smallest area that Flash will recognize as a color block. Curve Fit and Corner Threshold define how closely Flash conforms to the curves and corners recognized in the image. Results will vary depending on how clean your artwork is and your settings. On mine, setting the Color Threshold to 0, the Minimum Area to 3, the Curve Fit to Pixels, and Corner Threshold to Normal before clicking OK almost perfectly reproduces my original artwork in vector format.

If you do this, just select all of the fills that make up your shape and then convert them to a symbol to keep them cohesive and place them in your library.

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