Hello, I’m very new to flash, but I’ve done a a bit of research before finally having to post. Basically, I have a 3D CAD model of a car. My CAD program allows you to do simple animations, basically you input the parameters of how you want the camera to move, how many frames you want and the output will be a whole mess of .png’s .jpeg’s or .bmp’s whichever you choose.
The desired effect that I’m going for is to do a simple exterior rotation of the car, 50 frames long. And a simple interior rotation also 50 frames long with transitions in bringing you from the interior to the exterior and vice versa. The file starts opens stopped on the first frame which has mouseover objects to turn the car ccw and cw. There is a third button to move you to the interior view or exterior view depending the current view. And at any point in the rotation you can mouseover the objects and get detailed information on them and also click on them and it will bring you directly to a product page.
With all of that said, I have been able to create exactly what I wanted. I’ve got my file setup with 5 main layers (many others to handle the pop-ups) The first is 50 frames long with the .png’s output from the CAD program, and the second is the navigation (rotation ccw and cw, also the button to trigger the transition to the interior view) a third frame to handle the said transitions, and respectively a fourth and fifth frame to handle the interior 50 frames and navigation.
This is where I need help…happy is me that I’ve been able to figure all this out with quite a few google searches of implementation of the mouseovers etc. but when I went to compile, publish, the file it ended up being a bit over 6mb. Since I’m trying to use this a menu, this is obviously way too large. My target goal is 2-2.5 mb. I took all of my raw .png’s and put them through photoshop and just resaved them and it took the avg. file size from 245kb to 190kb. Put this back into flash, and I dropped down to about 4.5 mb, its getting there. Oh btw, this is with 70% compression in flash in the publish settings. Obviously still not there I take the raw’s through photoshop again looking for other ways to compress it. I found an option to “Save for Web and Devices” sounds good, so I take it from a png-24 down to a png-8 dithered and the avg. filesize shoots down to 40kb! Awesome! So I throw these newly processed .png’s into flash and publish…5.5mb!!! I try doctoring the files a couple more times through photoshop, trying turning off the transparencies, still 5.5mb, try turning them into jpeg’s of the same size, 6mb! Keep in mind that every time I process these images its 150 of them at a time, takes about 2.5 hours.
So I’m completely baffled at how a set of .png’s (png-8 dithered) that is 1/4 the size of another set of .png’s (png-24), actually increases the size of the final flash .swf… If anyone has any ideas of how I can go about this another way, or has any ideas on how I can compress these images w/o loosing that much quality, I am completely open to suggestions!!
Sorry for such a long post, wanted to be thorough…